Famine

North Korea is heading toward its worst food crisis since the 1990s because of flooding, successive crop failures and worldwide inflation for staples such as rice and corn, the United Nations World Food Program said Wednesday. The agency shied away from predicting another famine like the one that killed as many as 2 million people in the 1990s, but said its field staff was observing some of the same warning signs.

They call it the green hunger. Four-foot cornstalks sprout from rain-soaked earth, and wind billows fields of teff, the staple Ethiopian grain. Goats and cattle are getting fat on lush grasses -- but the children are still dying. "It's strange to see hunger when everything is so green," said Wariso Shete, 26, a southern Ethiopia farmer who recently buried his 3-year-old son. "But there is no food. The boy just starved."

Thousands of inmates in Kenya skipped lunch to send food to countrymen affected by drought, prison officials said. Most of Kenya's estimated 50,000 prisoners gave up their ration of beans and corn porridge on the day President Mwai Kibaki declared a national disaster and said about 2.5 million Kenyans would need famine relief in the next six months.

An estimated 11 million people in the Horn of Africa "are on the brink of starvation" because of severe drought and war, with at least 30 deaths already reported in Kenya, the United Nations said Friday. People in Somalia, Kenya, Djibouti and Ethiopia need food, water, livestock and seeds, the Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organization said in a statement.

The United Nations appealed for nearly $327 million in aid to help starving people in southern Somalia, which is suffering its worst drought in a decade. About 2.1 million people face severe food shortages caused by prolonged drought, war, displacement, flooding and human rights abuses, said the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. More than 11.5 million people will need food assistance in the next six months, the U.N. said.

Re "The world's other crisis," editorial, July 26 To lament global poverty while later implicating U.S. farm subsidies, not only as the culprit in the collapse of the World Trade Organization negotiations but as harming "every American taxpayer and consumer," indicates a lack of understanding of the issues. U.S. farm subsidies originate from the Dust Bowl era, when famine was a real possibility. They ensure sufficient production of grains by guaranteeing that farmers will receive a minimum "floor price."

Patt Morrison gets it ("Goodwill Hunting," Style, March 11). She's a true pro thrift shopper, or "picker" if you will, and I should know because I am too. We pity those who have an attitude against thrift shopping for the simple reason that they'll never know the pure joy of it. Some time ago I shared a suite of offices from which I conducted my feast-or-famine freelance writing business. Staffing the lobby were two salaried secretaries, and they just couldn't understand how I could show up in such unique and pricey get-ups.

One hundred million people will go to bed hungry tonight, and some will not wake up tomorrow morning. The U.N. World Food Program has called the sudden run-up in global food prices a "silent tsunami" that threatens the poorest of the poor. Add to food price hikes the devastating cyclone in Myanmar's rice-growing region, which has left perhaps a million survivors homeless, and the result is a global humanitarian crisis that will strain the resources of even well-funded relief groups. We urge all Americans to give now. And we offer this advice on how to give wisely: First, support what our government will not. In the case of hunger, that means directing a portion of your donations to Third World agricultural and sustainable development projects.

More than 150,000 people are surviving on donated food in the flood-battered city of Gonaives and the United Nations says more aid is needed to stave off famine in Haiti four months after ravaging storms. Haiti is already struggling with chronic malnutrition. The U.N. World Food Program is asking countries to donate $100 million for Haiti, saying current funding will last only through February. It requested the same last year but received only $68 million.

North Korea is sending millions of people from its cities to work on farms each weekend, another indication that the risk of famine is particularly high this year, a United Nations official said Wednesday. The U.N.'s World Food Program is the only aid organization operating in North Korea that has a presence outside Pyongyang, the capital, and its officials have reported movements of the nation's people from cities to farms, said Anthea Webb, spokeswoman for the Rome-based agency.