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Productive sanitation: Increasing food security by reusing treated excreta and greywater in agriculture

Currently some estimated 854 million people worldwide are chronically hungry due to extreme poverty; and about 2 billion people lack food security intermittently due to varying degrees of poverty (FAO 2006). Despite the great efforts and promising attempts being made to decrease the number of people suffering from food insecurity, this numer still remains high worldwide and will most likely intensify in the coming decades, due to the growing world population. A great deal of this population growth will take place in cities, causing a substantial increase in the volume of urban waste products, the over-exploitation of rural resources and a significant increase in urban food demand. Developing countries are particularly affected by the rampant urbanisation tendencies and face great difficulties in coping with this development.