4 July, 2009 – Greenleft Weekly

A handful of companies stand between millions of small farmers and millions of consumers in the food cycle

Three years ago, a number of news outlets reported on a troubling first-ever occurrence. The world’s obese people outnumbered the world’s starving.

This wasn’t because hunger was becoming any less of a problem. In 2006, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) said some 873 million people were undernourished — or one in every seven people worldwide.

At the same time, more than 1 billion people were very overweight — a result of sugar-laden, high-fat diets, increasingly inactive lifestyles and relentless corporate advertising.

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