Speaking at the UN Food and Agriculture Conference held in Rome this weekend, Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen called on policy makers to adopt a broader approach to ending hunger. Sen's calls coincided with the G8 meeting of heads of the world's richest states at the Lough Erne resort in Northern Ireland.

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"If the world wants to conquer hunger, it needs to tackle all the causes of hunger simultaneously particularly poverty, and not just concentrate on producing more food," Amartya Sen said on Saturday. Sen, a Nobel Laureate in Economics, told the opening session of the FAO Conference that the conventional, industry-driven narrative has held sway over food policy for too long.

His words are especially prescient given that UK environment secretary Owen Paterson is expected to call for a relaxation of European rules on genetically modified crops this week, citing the crops' potential to address hunger and reduce chemical inputs. British environmentalist and writer Tony Juniper argued on Sunday that claims from the GM lobby that new crops will solve problems of malnutrition and pollution are misleading and divert attention from the true issues facing farmers in food insecure regions.

In his lecture on Food Security this week, eminent philosopher and economist Sen said, "The main factors behind the continuation of world hunger include the huge continuation of poverty, despite the increasing prosperity of the modern world in terms of averages and totals.

"But poverty can be exacerbated by problems in the production side partly because of food supply falling behind food demand tends to raise food prices, which can make many families much poorer, given their incomes."

He pointed out that hunger and undernourishment are not uniform in a country, community, family or even among individuals within the same family. In analyzing causes of hunger, Sen added, governments will need to take into account "social norms and established conventions of sharing" especially between men and women, boys and girls.

Sen won the Nobel Prize in 1998 for his groundbreaking theory that hunger and starvation result from some people not having access to enough food - what he called entitlement - not because there is not enough food available in the country or region.

FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva said Amartya Sen's approach has shifted the debate on hunger from food production to access to food and from charity to a rights-based approach and that "it has transformed the way we fight hunger and poverty today.

In his lecture on Saturday, Sen said Africa was not experiencing steadily rising per capita food availability, as Asia is. In Africa, per capita food production was only 4 per cent higher in 2011 compared with the average of 2004-6, and was 2 per cent lower in 2010.

He called for a holistic approach to food security; based not on ramping up production, or producing new proprietary crops, but on improving education and access to food, tackling corruption and poor infrastructure and ending the disparity between treatment of men and women.