BANGKOK, (AlertNet) - A neglect of agriculture is at the root of an Asian food crisis and a new approach is needed to bring it back into fashion, a Nobel peace laureate said on Wednesday.

Professor Muhammad Yunus, known as 'banker to the poor' for starting a micro-finance revolution in his native Bangladesh, said these days agriculture was seen as a boring sector of "cows and poultry" best left to government ministries.

Rather, he said, young people eager to change the world and save the environment should get involved in transforming agriculture so it can feed today's population and withstand growing threats from climate change.

"When you bill it as a global issue, about how we live our lives, then immediately agriculture comes to the fore," he said at the launch of his new Yunus Centre in Bangkok, dedicated to promoting new ideas in agriculture to ensure everyone has enough to eat.

Prices of staples soared in 2008 amid a food crisis that some blamed on an inability to grow enough food but other people said had more to do with poverty and an imbalance of wealth.

"(Agriculture's) not simply a question of survival, it's not a question of subsistence agriculture or helping the poor farmers," he said. "It's an exciting way of changing the world. It's part of the total philosophy of how the world should be."

He said part of the problem was that since the postwar "Green Revolution" boosted crop yields significantly, the sector had languished and technological advances had largely stalled as big money moved into other industries deemed more lucrative.

"Food became a very uninteresting subject," he said. "It was neglected for years and now we're suffering for that."

He hopes to change that with a bottom-up community approach like the successful micro-financing scheme that brought him fame.

He is hoping the launch of the Yunus Centre at the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT), a post-graduate university in Bangkok, will attract motivated young people to the sector.

"Today's economy has only one kind of business - business to make money only," Professor Yunus said. "I'm proposing to do another kind of business based on selflessness, where getting things for myself is not the intention. The intention is to make it happen to others."

According to a recent U.N. study , close to 600 million people went hungry in 2007 and poverty is the leading cause of food insecurity in Asia-Pacific. The region is also home to 62 percent of world's undernourished.

"Poverty is not created by the poor people," Professor Yunus said. "Poverty is created by the system that we built... so if you want to see poor people get out of poverty, you have to change the system."

Reuters AlertNet is not responsible for the content of external websites.