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The world's hungriest people - 73 million of them - face a new crisis: the agency which feeds them is desperately short of cash to pay soaring food costs.
Unstoppable food price rises were behind this week's "extraordinary emergency appeal" for US$500 million ($621 million) from donors by
May 1 by the Rome-based World Food Programme.
If it cannot get the money, WFP director Josette Sheeran says the UN agency may have to cut food rations. The WFP's approximately 80 operations feed 73 million people.
The agency's operating budget of US$2.9 billion has been overtaken by soaring food prices - up 55 per cent since June - plus shipping and other transport costs as fuel oil prices spiral.
Even as Afghanistan requests more food aid and, says Sheeran, "numerous" other nations make inquiries, this dire situation could be exacerbated because the United States, which fuels 40 per cent of the WFP's budget, has said it may have to cut its contribution, citing higher costs.
While shoppers worldwide are reeling from rapidly rising food costs, the impact on the world's malnourished is unprecedented. "We've never quite had a situation where aggressive rises in food prices keep pricing operations out of our reach," said Sheeran.
The WFP says those most in need earn a $1 a day or less, but that the "new face of hunger" is impacting those who have access to food but not enough money to buy it.
The crisis may have other flow-on consequences that will affect wealthier nations.
Sheeran's plea follows a stark warning from the EU this month that global warming will create "millions of environmental migrants", a prediction that reinforces dire reports from the Pentagon, Britain's Defence Ministry, intelligence agencies and others of a chaotic future.
Refugees would originate in the world's poorest regions, which, as last year's requests for UN humanitarian aid show, are hardest hit by climate change. One of the major concerns is hunger.
If rich nations face soaring food prices, with the price index higher than at any time since its creation in 1845, the situation in poorer regions is desperate. The UN says 830 million people are malnourished. More die from hunger than Aids, tuberculosis and malaria combined.
"We're concerned that we are facing the perfect storm for the world's hungry," Sheeran told the New York Times in December.
By January grain stocks were at 54 days of world consumption, the lowest ever.
Addressing the European Parliament, Sheeran said the WFP budget bought 50 per cent less food than it did in 2002.
"The world is facing the most severe food price inflation in history," says Washington's Earth Policy Institute, "as grain and soybean prices climb to all-time highs."
If your food bill is high, consider Mali, where a loaf of bread costs 50 cents, half the average daily income.
One culprit is the US ethanol boom, which diverts corn from food to energy, catapulting the cost of milk, eggs, meat and other food from corn-fed animals.
Congress, hyping "energy independence", wants the US to produce 36 billion gallons of ethanol by 2022. In 2002 ethanol consumed 10.3 per cent of the US corn crop. Last year it was 24.7 per cent. America's ethanol bonanza has left many at the bottom of the economic ladder starving. The WFP says the US has already sold its 2007-08 wheat crop.
At the same time former exporters like China have become importers, driving up the market as sellers cashed in. In January, Russia said it would impose a 40 per cent tax hike on its wheat exports.
A University of Minnesota study that in 2004 predicted the world's malnourished would fall to 625 million by 2025 says ethanol production could reverse that trend and leave 1.2 billion people hungry by 2025.
"The US effort to reduce its oil insecurity has created unprecedented food insecurity," warns Lester Brown, director of the Earth Policy Institute.
He believes the ethanol boom might be a bigger foreign policy debacle than Iraq.
"The world will see Americans as determined to keep driving SUVs. And using ethanol regardless of how if affects everyone else."
And it was all going so well. In the late 1960s the UN classified 37 per cent of the developing world as hungry. Today it is 17 per cent _ an impressive success, given population growth. Amped up by the Green Revolution, which used land reform, irrigation, high-yield seeds, fertilisers and pesticides, the world grain harvest tripled after 1950, from 630 million to two billion tonnes.
According to the Worldwatch Institute this equalled the gains made by farmers in the 11,000 years up to 1950.
But whereas the ethanol bonanza is significant, it is not wholly responsible for what the UN calls an "unforeseen and unprecedented" hunger crisis.
Besides ethanol the UN's perfect storm is fuelled by the population boom, growing demand for meat and dairy as nations like China and India move up the food chain, water shortages, loss of farmland, soil depletion and rising shipping costs. The wild card, and the one that concerns "threat multiplier" futurists, is climate change.
Leaving aside the irony that ethanol is booming, in part, because of fears of climate change and a desire to wean the US off fossil fuels (there are other more cynical reasons, foremost being profit and political considerations in a highly subsidised industry), one of the major concerns sparked by global warming is that no one is sure how farming will, or can, adapt to severe or frequent changes in weather.
There are already signs that "unusual weather events" - drought, storms and floods - associated with global warming, and sometimes ominous precursors to pest infestations, disease and bankruptcy, have reduced grain production in the Ukraine and Australia, both major exporters.
Meanwhile, the Green Revolution's shortcomings - land exhausted and biodiversity ravaged by monoculture - plus over-reliance on expensive oil-based products, machinery and infrastructure have kicked in.
Back in the great famines of the 1980s - Ethiopia for instance - the impact was regional. Today, in a more connected world, it is global.
Climate change will likely hit developing nations hardest. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts yields on African farms reliant on rainfall could fall 50 per cent in the next 12 years. Hungry people can create failed states, such as Somalia or Haiti, which become magnets for terrorists and crime as refugees flee to the West.
Historically, food crises proved fatal to the Mayans in Central America, and the Sumerians in what is now Iraq. Both vanished when farming depleted the environment and left people hungry. Brown, hailed as one of the world's most influential thinkers by the Washington Post, writes that, like the Mayans and the Sumerians, "We are crossing natural thresholds that we cannot see and violating deadlines we do not recognise. Nature is the timekeeper, but we cannot see the clock."
The Earth Policy Institute advocates a sustainable future. This notion has begun to creep into economic thinking, prompted, in part, by Sir Nicolas Stern's warning that it is cheaper to tackle climate change now than later, but also because the costs of unsustainability are becoming apparent.
Most of the focus has been on energy. The true cost of oil, for instance, would factor in the environmental damage due to climate change. But environmental truth has not caught on in farming, although the food miles debate offers a glimpse of the future.
The growing signs that hunger and climate change are linked - whether directly through famine caused by floods and droughts, or indirectly by ethanol produced ostensibly as an alternative fuel - demands a radical rethink on food security. Rather than the Green Revolution, which like much human economic activity has often worked against, rather than in harmony, with nature, a new paradigm is necessary.
Thus, projections made by commodity analysts, who regard shortages as aberrations from the norm, may no longer be valid.
As climate change shifts the goal posts as regards weather, there is no normal any more. The new paradigm will involve drastic change. This can vary from creating marine reserves to replenish fisheries, to no-till ploughing, to nurturing forests. A tree saved may be worth more money than one felled, when flood prevention, soil control and carbon sequestration are factored into a bottom line based on environmental truth.
And, who knows, as food prices bite American consumers may decide ethanol profits for the 37,000-strong National Corn Growers' Association are unsustainable. It can't happen soon enough for the hundreds of millions of people who wonder where their next meal is coming from.
