China has set an example for the global fight against hunger by successfully feeding its 1.3 billion people and offering to help poor countries, a senior UN official said on Tuesday.

"As the world's most populous country, China has successfully used nine percent of the world's total arable land and 6.5 percent of fresh water resources to feed 1.3 billion people, equivalent to 20 percent of the world's total population," He Changchui, Assistant Director-General of the the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), said in an interview with Xinhua.

He, who is also FAO's regional representative for Asia and the Pacific, said that in comparison with the rest of the world, the Asia-Pacific region was facing a bigger challenge of food security due to a large population and limited resources.

"But China is an exception in the region. For years the country has maintained a favorable food security situation, mainly because the Chinese government has attached great importance to agricultural development and made large-scale investment in agriculture," He said on the sidelines of a world summit on food security, held from Nov. 16 to Nov. 18 at the FAO headquarters in Rome, which aimed to find a solution to the world hunger.

FAO estimated that about 1.02 billion people in the world suffer from hunger and malnutrition this year, and a child dies of malnutrition every six seconds.

He said China's experience has become the focus at the summit under current circumstances in which agricultural investment is inadequate, especially in the developing world as shown by FAO studies.

Kanayo Nwanze, president of the UN International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), also said on Tuesday that China's experience in eradicating hunger could be learned by other developing countries.

Besides its own success, China also reached out to other developing countries.

Earlier this month, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao announced that China would send 50 groups of agricultural experts to help Africa to train 2,000 specialists in agriculture, so as to improve the ability of African countries to achieve food security.

"This kind of cooperation has proved to be very effective, and it was widely welcomed by African countries at the summit. Some African leaders said the South-South cooperation would be a way to eradicate world poverty and hunger," He said.