Markets always "take the food out of the mouth of the poor to meet the higher appetite of the rich" . If the processes depend on capital investment and planning by those who control capital, it will ultimately end up using the poor and their capacities to meet the requirements of rich. Unilever and other companies would want small farmers to grow crops that are useful to them as raw material to make higher profits. The World Bank would still want these farmers to shift away from low value crops, which the poor can eat, to grow high value crops that are consumed by the richer people. The input traders such as the chemical companies and bio tech giants would want them to use technologies that will make their earnings bigger.

Even the promoters of ‘micro finance’ would want the poor to save a little more so that they buy more things from the market, thus catering to the needs of market expansion by capital.

The battle for control over the world food system, between the small farmers and poorer consumers on one side against the big traders, big TNCs and Supermarkets and those national level and global level controllers of the world food system on the other side, should end up in the struggle about who should have the power of planning and decision making.

What is suggested presently is that those who are now pushed out and excluded from the market should get more organized into cooperatives or collectives and that Governments in such countries should restart or initiate mechanisms of protection and support, such as "Marketing Boards" so that those excluded could become more competitive and bargain to be included to a greater degree. Basically what is suggested by the emerging new thinking which looks like a progressive position is that more space should be created to allow those who are completely excluded to enter into a global food system ( or a global market system ) that is fundamentally disadvantageous to the "poor".

It may also be useful to recognize that the present global system of market expansion is now threatening the very survival of the earth. The process of intensified extraction from nature and from human beings (the poor) for "growth and accumulation of capital" is excluding more and more people from survival while destroying the ability of nature to survive and to regenerate itself.

The people who are excluded from the market are beginning to recognize that they need to create "another world" that would include them and allow their survival. This realization can be a "great moment of history" if and when they realize that they have greater advantage not in trying to bargain (even collectively) to enter the system that is fundamentally designed against their interests, but in reversing the process.

This means that they should initiate a process of survival not by exploiting nature’s resources destructively, but by adopting methods that would restore nature’s capacity for regeneration. They do not have access to capital, which in some ways could be a blessing.. Therefore they have comparative advantage in using methods that depends least on capital. This is done by allowing nature to make its maximum contribution. In agriculture this approach is called "ecological agriculture". It can also be called "regenerative agriculture". This is a way of relating to nature in a manner that would restore its ability to regenerate. This is similar to what happens in a natural, undisturbed, tropical forest.

The ideal model for this approach is a "small plot of land". Where maximum diversity of useful crops for food, nutrition, medicine, fertilizer, fodder, fibre and fuel wood can be grown. Another principle would be to maximize the use of sunlight, a free gift of nature by growing trees and plants to different canopies with a mixture of short term and long term crops. Avoiding the use of harmful and expensive chemical fertilizers and agrochemicals is a requirement for allowing the natural process of restoration of soil fertility, improving the humus content and water retention capacity of soil. Use of animal waste such as cow dung is another very important requirement in soil improvement. Prevention of soil erosion which requires building ridges, mulching particularly on sloping land is very important.

It is very easy to show that overall productivity of such agriculture is much higher compared to large scale monocultures. Efficiency and sustainability is tremendously higher compared to large scale mechanized agriculture.

A small land holder having to survive on his or her small plot of land is a distortion created by the individualistic, capitalist system and is against nature’s way of providing means of survival for all forms of life (human, animal and plant). Therefore, the poor who are excluded from that mode of survival, that form of livelihoods could put their creative abilities potentials and strengths together to ensure survival of all. These collective efforts could be in restoration of ecological regeneration, protection and sharing of natural seeds, sharing of knowledge, skills and experiences, and sharing of food, labour and in meeting other needs.

All these require a process of taking control over the national and global food systems, which requires collaboration in the required political struggles. This struggle is local, national, regional and global.

This movement has already begun with concepts such as "food sovereignty" developed by global movements of small/ peasant farmers such as Via Campasena. Studies done in Asia, Africa and Latin America have shown that such agro ecology approaches are growing very rapidly. The crisis faced by the type of large scale industrial agriculture and the associated crises such as non sustainability of industrial farming, pollution and soil losses and contamination of food and environment with harmful inputs and drop in productivity and efficiency that requires more and more subsidies, failure of market adjustments such as the failure of WTO. Fear of unhealthy food and the growing opposition to the efforts of MNCs to take control over the world food systems and finally the dangers of Global warming and climate change is creating the possibilities for the small scale ecological farming and such farmers setting a new and more logical model for the whole world. The rich will have to adjust in to this more rational model since the poor , the billions of small farmers can not adjust into the irrational model. This adjustment alone will ultimately save them.

This is a model that is very different from the approach that big food trading companies such as Unilever would want to build in order to access, more effectively, the raw material they want and it is also different from the WB’s new thinking on using the potentials of agriculture and small farmers for further growth and expansion of capital.

Much more attention and concrete studies are needed to look into the already growing alternative models and to bring such experiences together towards making them the main stream way forward.