At first glance, Giuseppe Oglio's farm near Milan looks like it is suffering from neglect. Weeds run rampant amid the rice fields and clover grows unchecked around his millet crop.

Oglio eschews modern farming techniques – chemicals, fertilisers, heavy machinery – in favour of a purely natural approach. It is not just ecological, he says, but profitable, and he believes his system can be replicated in starving global regions.

Nearly 8,000km away, in laboratories in St Louis, Missouri, hundreds of scientists at the world's biggest seed company, Monsanto, also want to feed the world.

Monsanto, a leader in agricultural biotechnology, spends about $2 million (Dh7.34m) a day on research that aims to improve on Mother Nature, and is positioning itself as a key player in the fight against hunger.

Everybody wants to end hunger, but just how to do so is a divisive question that pits environmentalists against anti-poverty campaigners, big business against consumers and rich countries against poor. The food fight takes place at a time when experts on both sides agree on one thing – the number of empty bellies will only grow unless there is major intervention now.

A combination of the food crisis and the global economic downturn has catapulted the number of hungry people in the world to more than one billion.

World leaders will gather in Rome next week for the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation's World Summit on Food Security and will hear competing arguments over how best to tackle the problem. One of the fiercest disputes will be over the relative importance of science versus social and economic reforms to empower small farmers to grow more with existing technology.

Learning from the past

The last time the world faced such dire predictions of famine was before the Green Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, when countries such as India and China transformed their agricultural systems to become self-sufficient in food. They did so by harnessing plant-breeding technology to raise yields.

Through massive state investment in hybrid rice, China raised its yields from two tonnes per hectare in the 1960s to more than 10 tonnes per hectare by 2004. Chinese scientists seek further gains – 13.5 tonnes per hectare by 2015, according to the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).

To be sure, the Green Revolution had its downsides. But millions of people were saved from starvation, and the movement's architect, Norman Borlaug, received the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize.

"India sorely needs another Green Revolution," said Kushagra Nayan Bajaj, joint managing director of Bajaj Hindustan, India's top sugar producer. But a second green revolution would face a strong counterinsurgency, even in a place such as India that benefited so profoundly from the first one.

Economists and scientists in India are demanding a raft of policy initiatives, including allowing genetic engineering. India has so far allowed genetically modified (GM) seeds only for cotton, which has boosted productivity, but suggestions of allowing such seeds for edible crops have always evoked strong protests.

Rich consumers resist GM

Monsanto launched the world's first GM crop in 1996 and such crops are now grown in countries ranging from Australia to South Africa, the Philippines and Brazil. Up to 85 per cent of the massive US corn crop is genetically engineered, as well as up 91 per cent of soybeans and 88 per cent of cotton, according to US data.

As ingrained as GM crops may seem, a backlash against the technology appears to be growing. Opposition to genetic modification of seeds has long been strongest in Europe. The EU severely restricts use of GM seeds on its territory, as well as imports of products containing GM-derived food.

Now consumer resistance to what British tabloids long ago dubbed "Frankenfood" is taking root in the US too.

Where's the money?

The FAO said last month the world needs to invest $83 billion (Dh305bn) a year in agriculture in developing countries to feed a predicted population of 9.1 billion people in 2050. To achieve that, both public and private investment on a grand scale is needed, but the trend on the public side has been discouraging. Official development assistance to agriculture plunged 58 per cent in real terms from 1980 to 2005. It now stands at about five per cent, said the FAO.

Last year's food crisis, when fears of food shortages gripped grain markets – sending wheat and rice prices soaring to record highs and sparking hoarding and riots – was a wake-up call, one that experts hope will translate into sustained investment. The unrest was a powerful reminder of the risks of food insecurity.


IDEOLOGICAL WEDGE

For those seeking to end global hunger, rather than just satisfy rich consumers' craving for cappuccino, Africa presents the greatest challenges.

Monsanto, together with corporate rivals, is working with poor countries and charitable groups such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, set up by Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates and his wife.

At the annual World Food Prize forum last month, Gates warned that the fight to end hunger was being hurt by environmentalists who insist that genetically modified crops should not be used in Africa. He said it was vital to help small farmers there boost production by all means, including GM crops, fertiliser and chemicals.

"This global effort to help small farmers is endangered by an ideological wedge that threatens to split the movement in two," Gates said at the forum for the prize, which was created by the Green Revolution's architect Norman Borlaug, who died in September at the age of 95.

"Some people insist on an ideal vision of the environment," said Gates. "They have tried to restrict the spread of biotechnology into sub-Saharan Africa without regard to how much hunger and poverty might be reduced by it."

Rajul Pandya-Lorch, who has worked for the IFPRI thinktank on food for 22 years, summed it up: "I'm a Kenyan. I resent very much people telling us in Africa 'OK, this biotechnology is not good for you'. Well, we have different problems than you do, and if it helps us to solve a problem, we should try it."

Yet, even in Africa, there is suspicion of GM technology. Many countries there, such as Uganda, Zambia and Tanzania, do not allow GM seeds.

The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (Agra), a Kenya-based group set up in 2006 with support from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Gates Foundation, targets its programmes specifically at small-scale farmers.

Agra's Program for Africa's Seed Systems uses conventional breeding to develop new varieties of maize, cassava, beans, rice, sorghum and other crops resistant to diseases and pests. The goal is to develop and release more than 1,000 improved crop varieties over the next 10 years.

"We've adopted a small grant mechanism that gets money out to plant breeders on the ground, so that they can come up with something that's truly novel," said Joseph DeVries, Director of Pass.

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