segments of agricultural producers to unfair competition without any compensation programs. As a result of these policy measures, spending on agriculture has declined as a proportion of public expenditure. These models betray two serious conceptual errors: first, the reduced role of the state, and second, downplaying the role of agriculture and trying to create jobs in other sectors without understanding that rural people have few options apart from agriculture, while ignoring international market distortions. Budget cuts flowing from these approaches are reflected in three indicators: (1) reduced investment in research, extension services and education; (2) few resources for institutional modernization; and (3) scanty investment in human resources (Trejos et al., 2004).

The private sector has not been able to make up for these cutbacks in public spending on the productive sector, which is oriented toward producing food for the internal market, and this has left a significant investment gap.

Finally, in this introductory overview, we must stress that this set of policies presupposes that social spending in general (and in particular that for promoting AKST) will grow in real terms at least by the same proportion as GDP (Gonzalez and Avila, 2005), although it would be desirable for it to grow more than proportionally, since LAC faces the challenge of overcoming the severe shortages and needs of rural people and vulnerable groups.

5.2 Public Policies for Food Sovereignty:
Development and Culture
In a setting of nutritional vulnerability, food sovereignty is proposed as a medium- to long-term goal for combating hunger and poverty, but one that also has to do with other aspects such as access to land ownership, basic natural resources, credit, markets, education, health services, women’s participation, etc.: in other words, the capacity to decide what, how and when to produce in a sustainable way.

Developing policies to achieve this goal will require a

dynamic vision that, starting from the current situation, will involve intermediate phases and instruments to subsidize access to food in extreme cases. Food security concerns itself only with the immediate supply of food, providing or guaranteeing access to food by means such as keeping prices low and providing food stamps. A number of government programs have been confined to this goal, but they have not been effective in resolving the problem of hunger and poverty.

In this first section of the chapter we put forward some policies and instruments relating to both food security and food sovereignty programs, the importance of women’s participation, and the role of development and culture in achieving development and sustainability goals.

5.2.1 Food security
An initial issue for AKST support policies is that the rural people should have a reasonable level of security in their access to basic needs, particularly food. In LAC this issue is generally addressed through social policies, particularly those relating to food security. There has been much debate on this issue (see Chapter 1).

These social policies in Latin America have been implemented, on one hand, through private, individualistic and unequal models driven by the market, and on the other hand by public, social and egalitarian models for correcting markets (Huber, 1996). Both these approaches are reflected in the food policy measures taken to reduce hunger and poverty.

The interpretation of poverty as subsistence refers to the fact that income is inadequate to cover basic minimum needs for maintaining physical efficiency. This argument was followed by the work of nutritionists to establish the so-called “poverty line”. A family is considered poor if its income falls below this line. This approach has persisted since the postwar period and has been widely applied by international agencies, and it is still the criterion for mea-