Missing from this debate were the voices of the people who actually produce the food -- the world's rural populations.

"Ours is the point of view closest to production," says Isabel Cruz, coordinator of "Via Campesina," a coalition of farmers' organizations and rural workers' unions in 60 countries,Ñ"and although our point of view is not the only one, it is the missing element here."

"Communities of farmers and small producers see the globalization of food production from below," she continues, "and in our view, it is also producing a globalization of hunger."

Via Campesina began in 1991 as a way for small producers to share information and exert some influence over economic changes affecting their lives.

"We realized we were facing similar problems from one country to another," Cruz explains. "And it's much more difficult for rural people than for governments to share information and coordinate activity."

Many non-governmental groups holding parallel meetings during the World Food Summit agree that decisions affecting food production are increasingly made by international financial institutions like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization -- not by those who produce the food.

"In my country," says Cruz, who is from Mexico, "food production policies are not made in the Agricultural Secretariat but by the Finance Ministry." Cruz and many other rural activists in Mexico have criticized their government's policies, which have cut rural credit as part of an overall restructuring designed to produce a more favorable climate for foreign investment.

Lack of credit in rural areas of Mexico, as in many other Third World countries, contributes to the shrinking of these areas, as people find it more and more difficult to make a living on the land, and head for the cities or leave the country in search of work.

An even greater force is the instability of prices, as price controls and subsidies have been eliminated by economic reforms.

"No one knows now what the price will be for crops when they're harvested," Cruz explains. For example, in Mexico, corn, the traditional staple crop, is no longer bought at a guaranteed, subsidized price. Further, the new free trade agreements mean Mexican corn must now compete against corn imported from the United States -- where high-tech agriculture and huge holdings have lowered the cost of production to a level at which Mexico's small farmers cannot compete.

As a result, says Cruz, "they're driving people off the land. That's why one of the basic demands of Via Campesina is the right to produce. It makes no sense to talk about feeding the world through mechanized production if the effect is to displace millions of rural families, and make it impossible for them to live and produce."

Free-market policies have also spurred the growth of export agriculture in which large farms operated by transnational corporations grow crops exclusively for customers in the developed world. For example, in the Mexicali Valley along the U.S./Mexico border, rural communities have been transformed "into sources of cheap labor in which rural people are unorganized and poorly equipped to fight for their rights as workers," according to Gema Lopez, professor of education at the University of Baja California.

Via Campesina has called for guaranteed basic rights to rural communities, including the right of access to land as well as greater control over the marketing of food. It also calls for preserving a diversified agriculture.

Cruz notes that despite increasing criticism of these policies, it's difficult to propose alternatives.

"In theory, we have very little disagreement with the general goals of ending hunger and preserving rural communities, supported by the official Mexican government delegation. The problem is achieving those goals in practice. And the basic contradiction is between those goals and economic policies which make it impossible to achieve them."