A United Nations investigation team called on Wednesday for a global monitoring system to stop food companies using their market power to violate human rights.

The team headed by Swiss sociologist Jean Ziegler also said governments should take responsibility for the behaviour of big firms based on their territory and punish them when they offend.

"It is becoming imperative to extend the scope of application of human rights norms to ensure that corporations do not abuse their new-found power," the team said in a report due to be presented to the UN General Assembly in New York next month.

It was becoming increasingly clear, the report said, "that the monopoly control of the food system by transnational corporations can be directed towards seeking monopoly profits, benefiting the company more than the consumer".

In his role as UN special investigator on the right to food, Ziegler is charged with checking how far international agreements guaranteeing access to food are observed.

He previously courted controversy by blaming hunger among Palestinians on the Israeli military and by questioning the safety of genetically modified food given to starving Africans.

Ziegler said the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation estimated the number of underfed people in the world rose last year to some 840 million, 25 million up on 2001.

"Every seven seconds a child under the age of 10 dies, directly or indirectly, of hunger somewhere in the world...A child who dies of hunger amid plenty is murdered by the social order that prevails on this planet," he told a news conference.

The report, Ziegler's third, said it was "an outrage that hunger persists in a world where more than enough food is now produced to feed the global population."

"It is time to recognise that the neo-liberal economic model is producing great wealth but is simultaneously leaving many in great poverty, struggling to feed themselves," it added.

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