riculture Organization (FAO), commemorating the agency's Oct. 16, 1945 founding date. Monday also marked the first day of Anti-Poverty Week, which will include events in Spain and around the world to raise awareness of the issue.

FAO's slogan for World Food Day this year is "Invest in Agriculture for Food Security". But NGOs argue that the problem is not a lack of food production, but of the injustice surrounding access to and use of foods.

Theo Oberhuber, head of the Spanish environmental NGO Ecologists in Action (EEA), told IPS that enough food is produced in the world to cover the needs of everyone, so that no one would have to go hungry.

But, he added, there are two problems that stand in the way of this. The first is that a large part of all food, whether agricultural products or food obtained from oceans or rivers, goes towards feeding livestock "whose meat and by-products are consumed mainly in the countries of the industrialized North."

The second, he said, is social injustice. In many countries, the majority of the population cannot afford food, "not even food of lesser quality."

Olivier Longué, director general of Action Against Hunger in Spain, pointed out to IPS examples of lower-quality food: in Malawi and Guatemala, for instance, corn forms the basis of the subsistence diet, while in the Philippines the staples are corn, potatoes and plantains.

Action Against Hunger reported that every four seconds someone in the world dies of hunger-related diseases and that nearly one billion people suffer from hunger around the world.

The global NGO also noted that six million children a year die of hunger, which is responsible for half of all deaths of children under five. In addition, many children who survive hunger and malnutrition suffer disabilities for the rest of their lives.

The international NGOs Engineers Without Borders, Caritas and Veterinarians Without Borders, along with Prosalus, a Spanish organization that promotes health care in Africa and Latin America, launched in Spain the campaign "Derecho a la Alimentación: Urgente" (Right to Food: Urgent), and presented a DVD Monday in which they state that food security cannot be achieved without support for agricultural development.

They note that FAO statistics show that more than 70 percent of the people suffering from hunger around the world live in rural areas, where they should be able to feed themselves through agriculture.

The campaign is demanding that governments recognize food security as a basic human right, and that they review their policies on the question and promote agricultural development in a framework of environmental sustainability.

But the EEA questions FAO's call to "Invest in Agriculture for Food Security" because of the growing influence of agribusiness and concentration of land.

The EEA stresses that "more than 70 percent of the global pesticide market is in the hands of six giant agrochemical corporations, of which only three will be left within a few years."

The group adds that these companies control a large part of global seed sales in a lucrative captive market, by means of sales of genetically modified (GM) varieties that are resistant to the firms' own herbicides.

In addition, the offspring of some GM plants are sterile, which means they cannot be stored to grow future crops. Poor farmers thus become dependent on transnational companies, and are forced to buy new seeds every year.

The EEA also points out that the world's 10 biggest food companies account for one-quarter of all food produced worldwide, and 10 large chains account for one-quarter of all food sales.

As an example of the consequences of that policy, "in Spain, farmers often receive only 25 percent of the end price," says the NGO.

"If that is the situation in a developed European country, it's not difficult to imagine what happens in countries of the South, where the rural population lives in infrahuman conditions," said Oberhuber.