In fact it makes it worse. During the past two decades, the total amount of food in the world has increased, but so has hunger.

The main problem is that globalization of food production pushes small, self-reliant farmers off their lands and replaces them with larger chemical and machine-intensive corporate farms. It does not emphasize food for hungry local communities. Instead, it encourages exports resulting in monocultures — a single crop grown over thousands of acres. These crops are usually luxury items cultivated for export and are notoriously vulnerable to insect blights and bad weather, and cause soil infertility.

Global biotechnology companies claim they have the answer to world hunger. But biotech production does nothing to solve local hunger problems. Does anyone believe that the invention of biotech plants whose seeds are sterile — forcing farmers to buy new seeds every year — has anything to do with stopping hunger? The biotech industry's goal is not to feed the hungry, only to feed itself.

A recent United Nations study confirms that the world already has enough food. The problem is one of distribution. Global trade rules put food production and distribution in the hands of agribusiness giants, supplanting the traditional system of local production for local consumption.

The world is producing the wrong kind of food, by a process that leaves millions of people landless, homeless, cashless and unable to feed themselves.

This article is an excerpt from Take It Personally: How to Make Conscious Choices to Change the World [1] by Anita Roddick [2]. Copyright © 2001 HarperCollins Publishers. Used with permission.