Forget Mugabe. This week's UN food summit in Rome has opened up a far more profound debate over the future of the global economy and our ability to feed the world's ever-growing population. In the blue corner, the government and corporate leaders who argue that we need more trade, more markets and more globalisation. In the red corner, a growing number of people who point out that when you're in a hole, it's a good idea to stop digging.

Cheerleader for the blues is the British prime minister. Gordon Brown would have us believe that the best way of tackling the global food crisis is to conclude the current round of talks at the World Trade Organisation, which aim to liberalise international trade still further and open world markets to the exports of multinational corporations. According to Brown, and to other siren voices in the British press over the past week, a good dose of free-market medicine is what the world needs to bring it out of its current malaise.

Such medicine is more likely to kill the patient. It is precisely the liberalisation of agricultural markets that has exposed poor countries to the full force of the current food crisis, as their farmers have been overwhelmed by competition from cheap imports and local production systems have collapsed. Even countries such as Mexico and the Philippines, which were formerly self-sufficient in food, are now forced to buy in vast quantities to feed their own populations. To suggest that they need another free-trade deal is like tackling knife crime by handing out guns.

While local markets used to be protected from global price shocks, people now find themselves defenceless in the face of the perfect storm of factors which have forced up world prices. Free-market policies have driven millions of rural and urban workers in developing countries out of regular jobs and into the informal economy, where hunger is an ever present reality even at the best of times. As that hunger turns to desperation, food riots have erupted in 34 countries, including severe unrest in Egypt, Haiti, Bangladesh, Kenya and Somalia, to name a few.

The trade deal on offer at the WTO would exacerbate this problem by forcing open markets still further. In a plea to government ministers, UN chiefs and other officials attending this week's food summit in Rome, an international coalition of 237 farmers' organisations, aid agencies, food and trade specialists has published an open letter arguing that the global food crisis must not be invoked as a reason to rush through a WTO trade deal. Instead, the letter says, such a deal "will intensify the crisis by making food prices more volatile, increasing developing countries' dependence on imports, and strengthening the power of multinational agribusiness".

So where should we be looking for solutions? Certainly the world would welcome an end to the EU and US farm subsidies which lead to the dumping of agricultural produce on developing country markets, yet anyone who still believes that the WTO is going to deliver this has not done the maths. More importantly, agriculture needs a radical reorientation away from the mess that globalisation has made of it.

In the current crisis, the food sovereignty model that puts local producers and local markets first is winning over more and more followers. Investment in sustainable farming practices and genuine land reform would mark an important first step in that direction. But if there's one thing that everyone is coming to see, it's that "more of the same" is not an option

© Guardian News and Media Limited 2008