The cassava plant could help African farmers cope with climate change, a scientific report says.

"It's like the Rambo of the food crops," report author Andy Jarvis, of the Colombia-based International Center for Tropical Agriculture, said.

He told the BBC: "Whilst other staples can suffer from heat and other problems of climate change, cassava thrives."

The root crop is already one of the most widely consumed staple foods on the continent.

But the report also stresses the need for more research to make cassava more resistant to pests and disease.

Millions of people in up to five West African countries will face a food crisis in early 2012 if early warning systems are ignored, the United Nations and aid officials say.

The UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), together with the World Food Programme (WFP) and British charity Oxfam, said this week that failed harvests and low food reserves in the Sahel, and particularly the countries of Chad, Mauritania, Burkina Faso and Mali, would affect up to 11 million people.

We are right on the equator, and Speke, Moebius, Elena, Savoia and Moore, the five great glaciers of the the Rwenzori, the Mountains of the Moon, glint in the bright Ugandan sun. Usually lost in the mists that cloak these peaks up to 5,100 metres high, the glaciers are the only major ones left of the 43 that were mapped and named in 1906. Then, the ice covered 7.5 square kilometres, now it is thought to cover less than one.

A quarter of farmland is highly degraded, according to the first report into the state of the world's land resources

At the beginning of presentations introducing The Hunger Project (THP), we often address the difference between chronic hunger and famine. We talk about how images of emaciated children in war-torn countries are often what flow through our minds when someone says “world hunger.” And we talk about how unfortunate it is that, though victims of famine account for only eight percent of the world’s hungry, those images make headlines, while chronic, persistent hunger does not.