Facing the global challenge of food insecurity, Israel, known for its strength in innovation, has sponsored an international conference to look for solutions to the pressing issue.

The International Summit on Food Technologies from the Sea and the Desert, under the theme of "Sea the Future", was held from Tuesday to Thursday in Israel's southernmost city of Eilat, on the shores of the Red Sea.

"Among the challenges over the next decade, we are touching on one of the most important points for humanity," Israeli Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development Oded Forer said at the conference, adding that food insecurity "is our main challenge."

The event was an initiative by the ministry to promote cooperation and innovation in aquaculture and desert agriculture as part of the global efforts to address the issue of food insecurity.

Many countries in the world cannot continue to produce food as they previously did due to the changing climate, global warming, growing population and lack of resources. As a result, there is an urgent need for new cutting-edge technologies and methods in agriculture, experts said at the conference.

Organizers of the conference emphasized the necessity of countries to learn from each other's experiences and share knowledge to address the food crisis.

Currently about 828 million people worldwide are affected by hunger, and the number has been rising constantly in the past few years, said Vladimir Rakhmanin, assistant director-general of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and keynote speaker at the conference.

In addition, around 2.3 billion people in the world were moderately or severely food insecure in 2021, which brings the number of people unable to afford a healthy diet to 3.1 billion, or about 40 percent of humanity, said Rakhmanin.

Unwise usage of aqua resources and global food waste are the two major challenges human beings are facing, said Rakhmanin.

He added that many developing countries, especially the least developed ones, still lack adequate infrastructure, services, and know-how for adequate onboard and onshore handling and preservation of fish.

To address the food scarcity challenge, the Israeli government recently launched a program to find new protein sources from the sea and desert.