Food Shortages

Malah abu Lashin lay in the intensive care unit of Nasser Children's Hospital here Sunday, her frail 20-month-old body attached to a ventilator, an oxygenator and an intravenous pump. The lifeline that kept those devices functioning was equally fragile: a tenuous flow of electricity from a generator with just enough diesel in the tank to last 10 hours. "If the power goes off, we can pump those machines by hand," said Anwar Sheikh Khalil, the hospital's director.

At least three people were killed and 25 injured in food riots and clashes with U.N. peacekeepers Friday, a mission spokeswoman and Haitian radio said. A young man was shot in the head and killed during protests in southern Haiti. It was not immediately clear who shot him, though protesters blamed United Nations troops. U.N. soldiers fired because they were fired upon, said U.N. spokeswoman Sophie Boutaud de la Combe. She said the mission had opened an investigation.

From Cairo to New Delhi to Shanghai, a run on rice is threatening to disrupt worldwide food supplies as much as the scarcity of confidence on Wall Street this year roiled credit markets. China, Egypt, Vietnam and India, representing more than a third of global rice exports, curbed sales this year, and Indonesia says it may do the same. Investigators in the Philippines, the world's biggest importer, raided warehouses last month to crack down on hoarding.

The global run on food that has led to shortages and riots in Egypt, Haiti and other nations has made its way to U.S. shores. Concerned about rising prices and limited supplies of staples such as rice and flour, customers across the country have been cleaning out the shelves at big-box retailers, including Wal-Mart Stores Inc.'s Sam's Club and Costco Wholesale Corp. stores.

Ask Josephine Gonzalez how many children a family should have and the stick-figured 31-year-old mother answers without hesitation. "I only wanted three," she says, trying to soothe the naked baby boy who tugs at her ragged dress. But Gonzalez is, in fact, a mother of six. Her sister Angie Maquiran, two years older, has seven children.

The smell of freshly baked bread calms the room filled with women in frayed cloaks and worn slippers. Grateful for the assistance, they walk out of a Muslim Brotherhood social service center into the trash-strewn alley, clutching plastic bags packed with flat bread loaves. For five years, the Jordanian government has clamped down on the Islamist group's electoral ambitions and its charity programs, suspicious it was using good deeds to win political support.

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.

It's been a bad week for a global anti-poverty summit. Even before Wall Street's turmoil damped the generosity of donor countries, economists were predicting that food and fuel price shocks would drive 100 million people into destitution across the world. But Thorleif Enger and Michael Landau see opportunity amid the gloom. They have launched investments aimed at helping some of Africa's poorest countries ease the crisis by producing more food.

Cuba is limiting the quantity of basic fruits and vegetables people can buy at farmers markets, irritating some customers but ensuring there is enough to go around. Cubans who initially worried about getting enough to eat now seem confident they won't go hungry, despite the destruction of 30% of the island's crops last month by hurricanes Gustav and Ike. However, there are long lines and food is not plentiful.

Along the sides of the road, people comb through the grass looking for edible weeds. In the center of town, a boy about 9 years old wears a tattered army jacket hanging below his knees. He has no shoes. Sprawled on the lawn outside a bathhouse, poorly dressed people lie on the grass, either with no better place to go or no energy to do so at 10 a.m. on a weekday. Despite efforts to keep North Korea's extreme poverty out of view, a glance around the countryside shows a population in distress.