clipped from: www2.canada.com   

So here's the question: With the world producing ever increasing quantities of food, why does the number of people going hungry just keep rising?

Frances Moore Lappe gave the world a wake-up call on that very question 40 years ago when she wrote her seminal book, Diet for a Small Planet.

Food scarcity is not the problem, never has been.

The problem is how the world uses food, who controls the supply and the growing concentration of corporate power in global agribusiness, she argues.

The number of hungry rose again last year. In December, the UN reported 963 million undernourished people, about 40 million more than in 2007. That's a huge jump, due mostly to rising food prices in the last two years and partly to food crops like corn diverted to ethanol production.

The food crisis is really a crisis of democracy, says Lappe. As the gap between rich and poor grows with industrial farming, so do the "disparities in decision-making power that are at the root of hunger," she says.