All the econometric studies on world food prospects lead to the picture of an increasing food trade deficit in the Third World. We discuss here this topic using a more global approach based on a general equilibrium framework covering the whole World Economy and involving disagregated rural and urban sectors. With this model, we analyses the impacts of Third World demography and debt, oil price, rural productivity and developed region growth. The model finds that the food trade in 1960 to 1995 is highly sensitive to these variables. The oil shocks and the resulting economic stagnation in the industrialized countries has broken trade patterns that were supposed to bring welfare to LDCs. These implied a North to South food trade balanced by a South to North manufactured trade. To sustain 5 percent growth in shrinking industrial world markets, the Third World, and especially the semi-industrialized countries, would be forced to « export urban hunger ». At the end of the century, food would flow from South to North, in the opposite direction from what has been unanimously predicted by other studies.