One by one, the children are placed on a scale hanging from a makeshift wooden stand. The mothers look pleadingly at the Doctors Without Borders aid worker, but he keeps his eyes on his clipboard, tallying the figures that determine whether each child is sick enough to eat today. The scales in a rural clinic in Hadero, Ethiopia, are the latest indicator of the severity of the global food crisis. There is only enough medicine and high-energy Plumpy'Nut peanut paste for the most severe cases. Outside, hundreds of hungry women and children throng the gates, desperate to go through the same brutal selection process, pushed back by guards brandishing sticks to clear a path for the next in line. In this African nation, about 10 million people, more than 12 percent of the population, are now in need of emergency food aid after a drought wiped out harvests. But because grain is now twice as expensive as a year ago – if it is available at all – there is not enough food in Ethiopia to feed everyone in need. |