Behind the food riots: a debate on how best to farm

But he's no poster boy for the new world agricultural order, in which peasants are supposed to leave their unproductive farms and strive for middle-class prosperity while food production is left to agribusiness in the countries that farm most cheaply and efficiently.

Sanchez works for the National Campesino Federation, a lobbying group for small farmers that has been active lately in protests against the rising price of food, notably a doubling of the price of tortillas. Here, NAFTA and globalization are dirty words.

Around the world, governments are trying every play in their books to stave off food riots -sending troops to hand out food in slums, ordering sweeping wage increases, banning grain exports and suspending futures trading. The United States is promising millions in emergency food aid.

But many experts call these Band-Aid solutions, saying what's needed is a radical rethink of how the world gets its food.

However, they're deeply divided about which way to go.

Some would in effect reverse the fundamentals by investing massively in small farmers, instead of letting them sink in a free-trade world. That would be very different from what the U.S. has long been evangelizing -take uncompetitive food producers off the land and put them in new jobs with paychecks that would buy them cheap food, efficiently farmed.

Others argue that the problem is not that trade is too free, but that it should be freer. U.S. and European farm subsidies are bad enough, they say, and things will only worsen if the present crisis triggers more restrictions.

Those at the sharp end of rising prices feel like victims of a bait-and-switch maneuver -when they quit the land, they were promised food would get cheaper, and now it's costlier.

"Not only are farmers not growing food, but we are going hungry because we can't afford the foreign food that drove us off our farms," said Mario Aguila, 48, who left his farm in Oaxaca state because he could no longer support his family.