Agricultural technology is built on the assumption that world hunger is caused by a scarcity of food and a lack of technology, and that therefore new technologies are needed to produce more food for the world's growing population. However, hunger is caused not by scarcity, but by free market economic policies that undermine food security and local self-reliance and create a system of institutionalized economic justice. These policies, whose effects are worsened by economic globalization, allocate food not to the needy, but to oligopolistic global markets where one dollar equals one vote. Agro-biotechnology will only exacerbate this situation.

— Carmelo Ruiz

"Winners and Losers in the Biotechnology Revolution" in Avant Gardening (Autonomedia, 1999)