On the days when she can't afford three meals, Ndaloswa Bekinala cuts back to two meals and gives tea to her family instead of a proper meal.
Sometimes she has to mix corn husks into the food to make it last longer. She knows that her children and grandchildren are hungry, but they don't complain.
"I've been telling them how life is changing," says the woman, 57, who lives in one of Malawi's poorest districts.
"When there is no food, they have to understand. We're not happy to see them suffer, but they understand by now. We just teach them that there's no food."
Bekinala and her family are among the millions of people around the world who have been pushed into hunger by a painful double whammy: soaring food prices and global recession.
Ministers of international cooperation from the G8 nations were holding an unprecedented meeting in Rome Thursday and Friday to discuss how to help the poorer nations survive the global crisis.
After decades of progress, the scourge of global hunger is suddenly on the rise again. The number of hungry people in the world, defined as those getting fewer than 1,800 calories per day, is projected to rise by 104 million people this year, pushing the world total to a record number of more than a billion, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.
Another U.N. agency, the World Food Program, warned Thursday that millions of families in dozens of developing countries are coping with the economic crisis by going hungry, withdrawing their children from school, and cutting back on meals and health care.
"For those living on less than $2 a day, the financial crisis is accelerating hunger, and the worst is yet to come," said Josette Sheeran, executive director of the W.F.P.
The economic slump has been devastating for unskilled workers, families that rely on remittances from abroad, workers laid off from the export sectors, and those working in mining and tourism, the agency said.
"The worst-hit are not necessarily the poorest of the poor, but a new group of people who face a downward slide into poverty," a W.F.P. report said last Thursday.
"Communities are still reeling from food and fuel price rises which peaked in 2008," it added. "Prices remain stubbornly high, and with the economic downturn, many workers abroad can no longer send home money to feed their families."
The agency has devised an Economic Shock and Hunger Index to calculate the impact of the crisis. Based on this index, it took a closer look at five of the most vulnerable countries: Armenia, Bangladesh, Ghana, Nicaragua and Zambia -- although it said the trends in those countries were just an illustration of the broader problems in dozens of other countries.
In Zambia, for example, the once-booming copper mining industry has lost 25 percent of its work force because of the global recession, and the Zambian currency has lost a third of its value against the U.S. dollar, causing a sharp rise in the price of food, fuel and fertilizer.
In Bangladesh, declining exports of jute and garments have caused 300,000 job losses, while remittances from workers abroad are dramatically declining. Remittances dropped by 9 percent in February alone, and large numbers of Bangladeshi migrant workers have been deported from the Persian Gulf states and other countries.
In Nicaragua, exports have declined by 20 percent, and 20,000 workers have been laid off. In Ghana, remittances have plunged by 16 percent in the past year, and the currency has dropped by about 25 percent against the dollar. In Armenia, exports have fallen by half, while 15,000 newly unemployed workers have been registered in the past six months.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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