Poverty

Amado Campos stands before a makeshift altar in his living room, crosses himself and prays to St. Jude, patron saint of lost causes. "Help me, San Juditas. Bring good people in my path and keep the bad ones far away." It is just after 10 a.m.

Friday's "20/20" finds Diane Sawyer in starkly different environs than the cheerily lighted Times Square studio she occupies each morning as co-host of "Good Morning America." In her latest ABC prime-time special, which examines poverty in Appalachia, Sawyer is scrubbed free of the glamour of morning television.

As the temperature plunged to minus-40 degrees last month, Nastasia Wassilie waited. The 61-year-old widow had run out of wood and fuel oil, and had no money to buy more. Nor was there much food in the house. But people here in rural Alaska try to take care of themselves. Her sister would come to help. Surely she would.

Like everybody else these days, politically engaged Hollywood -- and particularly its younger activists -- is in a back-to-basics mood. That's why David Arquette called together a group of actors, musicians, artists, even some athletes, recently at the Beverly Hills home of his manager, Eric Kranzler, to discuss new ways of taking on one of the oldest of causes: feeding the hungry.

The global recession is expected to push 89 million more people into extreme poverty by the end of 2010, the World Bank said Wednesday as it called on the leaders of the 20 largest economies to engage in "responsible globalization." Although economic data show that the worst recession of the post-World War II era might have ended for the United States and that global trade has begun to pick up again, low-income countries are still reeling from the effects of a financial crisis created by their wealthier counterparts.

He sits quietly at the corner cafe, a gold watch flickering on his wrist. If you need a liver, or want to sell a piece of yours, grab a chair and get acquainted with Mustafa Hamed, a 24-year-old ex-bus driver who fell unexpectedly into a life as a broker in human organs. Hamed's 4-year-old son, Mohamed, was dying of cancer and needed an artery transplant that cost $5,000. The only savings Hamed had was what he fished from his pockets at the end of the day.

Higher food prices risk wiping out progress toward reducing poverty and, if allowed to escalate, could hurt global growth and security, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Sunday. Opening a United Nations trade and development conference here, Ban pledged to use the full force of the world body he heads to tackle the price increases, which have already sparked riots in Asia, Africa and Haiti.

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.

The global economic crisis is destabilizing a growing number of developing countries, sharpening security risks in many regions at a time when the United States and its wealthy allies are preoccupied with their own problems. The distress is likely to push tens of millions of people below the poverty line, stirring social unrest that weakens governments and threatens to increase the number of "stateless zones," lawless areas that are havens for criminals and violent extremists, say U.S.

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.