I definitely think the price of food is going up. We need to figure out ways to manage that in a sustainable way. We have to figure out ways of increasing wages so people can afford it. That means redistribution, and rich people don't like to hear that. This administration simply won't hear of it. But without it, I fear even more Americans will be going hungry in the future.

I do think we have a food problem. In 2006, which is the year for which we have the latest data, 35.5 million Americans were food insecure. That means there are 35.5 million Americans who are so hard up at some point during the year that they didn't know where their next meal was coming from. That's a lot of Americans. They don't get reported very much because there's nothing spectacular about people skipping a meal because they're poor. The media tends to ignore that, just as it ignores the sort of chronic food shortages elsewhere in the world.

India has the largest number of hungry people. Yet it's an outcome of precisely the same mechanism. It's the control of agriculture that drives down the price it paid for food that it buys from farmers, who are the poorest people. Then you're paying very little for food. You're underpaying the poorest people in any society. Then they're marketing to us the things that are most profitable to them. And those are the things that are packaged and processed and what-have-you. That means you have the simple thing of the explosion of obesity and hunger as a result of capitalism in our food system.

Food sovereignty... is most of all characterized by it’s conversations around how to end hunger and poverty.

The problem is that we are living now with the consequences of the others people mistake. It would be nice to make our own and learn from them. That is the art of democracy. That is the art of citizenship.

Exporters monitor economic and political policies to the developing world, but the consequences of that have been to make developing countries far more sensitive to the constant fluctuations. Developing countries are not always allowed to support their farmers in the same way as the U.S. or Europe is. They're not allowed to have tariff barriers. They're forced, more or less, to shrink their social programs. The very poorest people have fewer and fewer entitlements. The consequence of this has been that there's been a chronic increase in the vulnerability of those economies to price shocks.

We have the industrial agriculturalists who try and make an argument that big is beautiful. But if you do the math, and particularly if you factor in that the price of oil is going to go through the roof, and so the price of transportation is going to go through the roof - making it abundantly clear that it's out of whack. The efficiency arguments are already crumbling, particularly if you actually include the cost of food pollution that these industries cause. They are tremendously unsustainable and tremendously inefficient.