Food scarcity is not the problem, never has been. Food production has generally gone up faster than population growth, so there’s enough food to go around, says Lappe. (In 2008, for instance, world grain production went up five per cent while population growth was up 1.2 per cent.)

The problem is how the world uses food, who controls the supply and the growing concentration of corporate power in global agribusiness, she argues.

“Things have gotten both worse and better since the 1970s,” says Lappe in an interview from the Small Planet Institute, an independent think-tank on democracy and food issues she runs in Cambridge, Mass.

“We’re still making hunger out of plenty,” says Lappe, who will speak Monday in Edmonton at International Week at the University of Alberta, says.

The number of hungry rose again last year. In December, the UN reported 963 million undernourished people, about 40 million more than in 2007. That’s a huge jump, due mostly to rising food prices in the last two years and partly to food crops like corn diverted to ethanol production.

In 1971, Lappe pointed out that the world’s grain crop, rather than feeding people, was increasingly being fed to cattle for meat for richer countries. Since then the trend to feed protein to animals has become much worse. In addition to a third of the world’s grain, most soya meal goes to cattle; one-third of the ocean’s fish stock is now animal feed; and a quarter of U.S. corn goes into feed for automobiles.

And there’s even more corporate concentration.

“When I started out, there were hundreds of seed companies,” says Lappe. “Now five or six control half the world market, and in GM (genetically modified) crops, there’s only one, Monsanto.”

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