A/HRC/9/23 page 6 the many others, the main problem, not food shortage. Producing more food will not alleviate the hunger of those who lack the purchasing power required to gain access to the food which is available. Moreover, speaking in aggregate terms obfuscates distributional questions. We need to produce food in order to raise not just the supply of food, but also the purchasing power of those who produce it. 5. In addressing the global food crisis, we should therefore constantly remind ourselves of who the food insecure are, in order to target our efforts at increasing their purchasing power. Most of the food insecure live in rural areas. Agricultural workers are among the most vulnerable, owing due to the often informal character of their employment, depriving them of legal protection from their employers. They amount to 450 million, and represent 40 per cent of the world's agricultural work force.7 Another important category of food-insecure people are the small-hold farming households.8 Unless carefully tailored to increase the purchasing power of this category, measures to boost production may lead to investments in large-scale agricultural exploitations, working with technologies and providing markets not accessible to small-holders. There are approximately 500 million small-holder households, totalling 1.5 billion people, living on two hectares of land or less. Many are facing an unprecedented increase in the price of inputs, as a result of the increase of the price of oil and, for livestock farmers, of crops, at the very same moment that, as net food buyers, they are spending larger amounts of their budgets on food. International market price increases will benefit some, particularly in India and China, but not many others, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. Higher food prices do not always trickle down to the farm-gate, where many poor farmers must sell. To increase their yield, they need access to credit to pay for fertilizer, seeds, and tools. They need access to technology to boost productivity. They will be helped, not by being provided food, but by being supported to produce food, and to sell it at a remunerative price and thus, from their position as net food buyers, become net food sellers. For them, the alternative is clear: to live from farming their small plots, or to join the rapidly expanding slums of the larger cities. 6. The challenge we face, in sum, is not simply to increase production; it is also to ensure that the current increase in food prices can be seized as an opportunity in order to advance the realization of the right to food by the adoption of structural measures, leading to a profound reform of the global food system. The section below explains why this is so, and why adopting a human rights framework will help to achieve it. 7 8 http://www.fao-ilo.org/fao_ilo_rural/en/. More precisely, it has been estimated that about half of those who are food insecure in the world live in smallholder farming households ; two-tenths are landless ; one-tenth are pastoralists, fisherfolk, and forest users ; and the remaining two-tenths are the urban poor (U.N. Millennium Project, Halving Hunger: It Can be Done, Summary Version of the Report of the Task Force on Hunger (The Earth Institute, Columbia University, 2005), p. 6).