MEXICO CITY - Sitting in a Mexico City office, dressed in a pressed white shirt, Gerardo Sanchez seems a world away from his herds of goats and fields of beans.

But he's no poster boy for the new world agricultural order, in which peasants are supposed to leave their unproductive farms and strive for middle-class prosperity while food production is left to agribusiness in the countries that farm most cheaply and efficiently.

Sanchez works for the National Campesino Federation. The lobbying group for small farmers has been active lately in protests against the rising price of food, notably a doubling of the price of tortillas. In Mexico, NAFTA and globalization are dirty words.

Around the world, governments are trying every play in their books to stave off food riots -- sending troops to hand out food in slums, ordering sweeping wage increases, banning grain exports and suspending futures trading. The United States is promising millions in emergency food aid.

But many experts call these Band-Aid solutions, saying what's needed is a radical rethink of how the world gets its food.

However, they're deeply divided about which way to go.

Some would reverse the fundamentals by investing massively in small farmers, instead of letting them sink in a free-trade world. That would be very different from what the U.S. has long been evangelizing -- take uncompetitive food producers off the land and put them in new jobs with paychecks that would buy them cheap food, efficiently farmed.

Others argue that the problem is not that trade is too free but that it should be freer. U.S. and European farm subsidies are bad enough, they say, and things will only worsen if the present crisis triggers more restrictions.

Those at the sharp end of rising prices feel like victims of a bait-and-switch maneuver -- when they quit the land, they were promised food would get cheaper, and now it's costlier.

"Not only are farmers not growing food, but we are going hungry because we can't afford the foreign food that drove us off our farms," said Mario Aguila, 48. He left his farm in Oaxaca state because he could no longer support his family.

Aguila now sweeps floors in a Mexico City mall and marched in last year's protests against tortilla price rises.

The pain inflicted on Mexican farmers by NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, was supposed to be offset by cheap grains for consumers, said Jeff Faux of the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute. "But when the U.S. Congress realized the potential of ethanol, corn was diverted there, and Mexico was left high and dry," Faux said. "The corn turned out to be not that cheap."

The Campesino Federation estimates 200,000 Mexicans a year have fled the countryside for the city or the United States since NAFTA was launched in 1994.

There are those who say it's not free trade that's to blame but the sudden seismic shift in the global economy -- ballooning oil prices, a biofuel boom that is gobbling up farmland and a voracious Chinese market for food. Get used to it, they say -- the era of cheap food is over.

But Tyler Cowen, a professor of economics at George Mason University, recalls that the last big food price increase, in the 1970s, was followed by agricultural advances known as the "green revolution" that hugely increased the supply and brought down costs. "If we don't mess this up we can expect the same today," he said.

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