If Africa's leaders promote improved crop production and healthy living, hunger on the continent can be eradicated by 2025, the Associated Press reported.

The head of the U.N. Food and Agriculture agency Jose Graziano da Silva told the AP the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) believes hunger can be eliminated around the globe "in a generation - in our lifetime" if world leaders politically commit to making nutritious food accessible to their citizens.

"We are not talking about sending a man to the moon or something that complicated," Graziano da Silva told the AP. "We have the technology. We have the expertise. We have the things that we need to do it."

Graziano said the World Food Programme found three key factors that would make eliminating global hunger possible by looking at how the 62 countries that have achieved the first U.N. Millennium Development Goal - reducing extreme poverty by half - did it before the target date of the end of 2015.

The first factor is "Political will" and leadership. This is a paramount factor because improving food security involves improvements not only in agriculture but in nutrition, health, water supplies and storage facilities, to name a few, Graziano said.

"If the president doesn't take the lead, or the prime minister ... it doesn't work," Graziano told the AP.

Second is improving agricultural performance and access to food.

"According to FAO, we have more than enough food produced nowadays to avoid hunger," he said. "People are hungry today because they don't have access to food ... because they cannot pay for the food or they cannot produce it any more as we did in the past."

However, a major setback is that 33 to 50 percent of the food produced today is lost or wasted for a variety of reasons including bad storage, poor transportation and cultural issues, including the move from traditional cuisine to fast food, Graziano said. A lot of food that could be consumed is thrown out, often because of huge portions.

The third factor is improving the nutritional value of the food people eat.

"We are seeing more and more malnutrition rise in developed countries ... because of the quality of what (people) are eating," he said. "You see in families with the lowest income a proportion of obese and malnourished (youngsters) similar to the families that have high level income," he said.

The FAO is promoting the best practices collected from around the world to rid the globe of hunger, especially in Africa.

"[Africa] have the worst situation at the moment," Graziano said.

He said he hopes an African Union summit in January will set a target to eradicate hunger in Africa by 2025.

"All countries in Africa can do it ... with the proper assistance FAO is giving them," he said.

In the beginning of 2012, the FAO declared a famine in Somalia, but with improvements in agriculture and livestock raising and "a cash-for-work program aimed primarily at women because they provide food for the family," the country was pulled out of famine in six months, Graziano told the AP.