JOHANNESBURG -- American good guru and author Frances Moore Lappe has one message on world hunger for the UN Earth Summit: It's all about access.

Access by farmers to credit and land, that is. "The problem with world hunger is access, it's not production or supply. There's more than enough food to go around," said Lappe, author of the 1971 best-seller "Diet for a Small Planet."

"People talk about this hunger crisis all the time but it's not rocket science. Small farmers need to be paid a fair price for their products and the poor need access to credit and land," she told Reuters on Thursday on the sidelines of the summit.

Hunger is a major theme at the 10-day world summit on sustainable development which began on Monday.

It is seeking to hammer out a global action plan to improve the environment while finding ways to implement the UN's millennium development goals, which include a pledge to halve the proportion of people who suffer from hunger by 2015.

Lappe was one of the first activists to sound an alarm in the 1970s about what some greens say are the inefficiencies of the livestock industry, accusing it of gobbling calories that could fill the bellies of the poor.

"When I wrote "Diet for a Small Planet" in 1971, a third of all grain was used to feed livestock. Now it's closer to half," she said. "In the U.S. system, it takes 16 pounds of grain to produce one pound of steak. To produce the same pound of steak takes between 2,000 and 12,000 gallons of water."

She said the government rents spots at almost no cost on city-owned ground to entrepreneurs to set up stalls.

For this advantage, they have to sell their products at low prices set by the city, but the price is fair and costs are kept down by linking sellers directly to local producers, cutting out the middlemen.

"This and other alternative models are not 'anti-market'," Lappe said.

Lappe also said land reform was crucial, arguing it saves governments in the long run because it prevents a tide of displaced rural dwellers from flocking to the shanty-towns of the developing world, adding to crime and other social problems.

"Keeping people tied to the land is not dooming them to a life of poverty and subsistence farming, if they are given land and access to capital. Then rural communities can begin building schools and accumulating wealth," she said.