DAKAR, Sept. 2 (Xinhua) -- Senegalese President Bassirou Diomaye Faye on Monday called for increased investment in accelerating the transformation of Africa's food systems.

Investing massively in modernization, water management, local transformation and digitalization is an urgent necessity in Africa, where "agriculture is vulnerable to unpredictable weather phenomena exacerbated by climate change," the president said at the opening ceremony of a forum on food systems in the city of Diamniadio, near Senegal's capital of Dakar.

"As we gather here, millions of women and men are working in the fields during the rainy season. Most of them cultivate the land with their bare hands or with rudimentary tools. They can only rely on a few months of rainfall," Faye said, with his Rwandan counterpart Paul Kagame in attendance.

In Africa, "more than elsewhere in the world, agriculture remains exposed to unpredictable weather patterns, compounded by climate change and its consequences," he said.

"This situation severely limits our production capacities in both time and space. All these factors contribute to the persistence of hunger and malnutrition on our continent, while pushing Africa further away from achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goal 2, which aims for zero hunger by 2030," he added.

Scheduled to run until Sept. 5, the 2025 African Food Systems Forum is being held under the theme "Driving Collaboration, Innovation and Delivery in Food Systems Transformation." ■