"The deregulation of the market has meant that the transnationals have bought and controlled the market chain," said Paul Nicholson of La Via Campesina, an international support group for small farmers meeting in Rome this week.

"Global markets generate hunger," Nicholson told a news conference. "It's logical, because the global market means importing cheap food from anywhere. Supermarkets don't feed society, it's peasants who feed society," he added.

Surging food prices -- the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation says they rose 40 percent last year -- do not benefit the small farmer, said the activists, who held a forum in Rome hosted by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), a UN agency working to eradicate rural poverty.

"A tiny minority of big producers benefit" from rising food prices, said Ibrahimi Coulibali, who heads a federation of farmers' associations in Mali, west Africa.

The activists called for an overhaul of the world food market to protect small farmers, regulate production and supply and fight monopolies.

"There cannot be these (international) agreements that are controlling the whole price regime," Nicholson said, lamenting a lack of "transparent knowledge of what is happening in the food chain."

Coulibaly said the solution lay in "supporting local markets and producers, notably by giving them access to land, rejecting agrofuel and setting up instruments to break the cycle of speculation."

"What we want are honest prices that will allow us to continue doing our jobs," he said.

The problem is exacerbated by global warming and the development of biofuels, said Henry Saragih, executive secretary of La Via Campesina, which has 140 members in 56 countries.

"They are all linked: the free market, agrofuel and climate change are increasing hunger for poor people," he said.

"The big extension of the most fertile land in the world is not for food production but for petrol for cars," said Nicholson, head of a small farmers' group in Spain's Basque Country.

"This is not an opportunity for small farmers," he stressed. "They don't benefit."

Consumers -- who include farmers -- are also squeezed, Nicholson said.

He cited a recent study that found an average 600 percent markup between origin and destination -- what the farmer earns for a kilogramme of produce compared with what the consumer pays.

"The food transformers, the food stockers are blackmailing citizens who are the losers," he said. "The consumers are having to pay this huge food price increase. They lose on prices, they lose on choice and they lose on quality."

The Farmers' Forum and the IFAD governing council issued a joint call on Wednesday for member states to "urgently direct their policy attention and their investments towards smallholder agriculture and rural livelihoods."

The British daily the Guardian named Saragih, a vegetable farmer from Sumatra, Indonesia, as one of "50 people who could save the planet" in a feature on the environment last month.

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