WHO would question the premise that food is one of the most basic of human needs? But for many poor people in the southern world, the struggle to feed their families is an increasingly difficult one. And it's not just a case of having too many mouths to fill.
Maxilla Chepakwamoi is a farmer from Mount Elgon in western Kenya where maize is the main cash crop. Here, families live in persistent poverty even though their land is fertile and lush.
Their poverty isn't due to the physical environment but to history, politics and economics. Maize takes up 70 per cent of all cultivated land in the district but it takes eight months to mature. This means only one harvest a year and since 1995 prices have steadily fallen. "When you grow maize alone, as a cash crop, it brings in too little money," explains Maxilla. "The middlemen really exploit us by not offering us good prices, but we have to sell it so we can buy other vegetables."
This problem is repeated across the world. Today 800 million people, nearly 20 per cent of the world's population, will go to bed hungry. Over one-third of the world's children will not have sufficient nutritious food and two billion people continue to suffer from diseases linked to an inadequate diet.
Paradoxically, the world now produces enough food to feed all its people. But many poor people do not have access to either the resources - land, water, seeds - to produce food, or an adequate income to enable them to buy it in the market. Hunger is a problem of poverty and inequitable distribution and changing global markets are increasing the gaps between rich and poor.
Southern countries are under pressure, as part of economic reform programmes, to remove support to their farmers whose produce has to compete with subsidised northern exports. At the same time northern governments continue to protect their agricultural sectors and limit outside access to their markets. For example in Kenya, which is where I have been working for the last three years, national expenditure on agriculture has declined from around 10 per cent of GNP in the 1960s and 1970s to only 5.2 per cent in 1993-95. With such steep cuts in expenditure, technical assistance has become almost non-existent, seeds are not readily available and farmers can no longer get loans for tools and fertilisers.
This is coupled with extremely poor delivery of services which almost entirely exclude the poor. This was confirmed by a recent impact study which ActionAid carried out of two major agricultural projects supported by the World Bank in Kenya. The design of the study was simple - we asked over 500 poor households how they had benefited from these projects. Many of them did not even know these projects existed and virtually none had benefited.
The situation in Kenya is not unique among southern countries. It demonstrates that control over food production and trade needs to be put back into the hands of local people, particularly poor women, and that requires political will.
Only then can governments claim to have delivered on their commitments to food as a basic right and can people like Maxilla in Mount Elgon be confident of a future that is free from hunger and insecurity.
Salil Shetty is director of ActionAid in Britain