Special Section: THE WORLD FOOD CRISIS

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Food riots have become commonplace in vast sections of Bangladesh and India. "In the worst-affected areas, gruel kitchens have been opened that provide a watery mess of broken wheat, fragments of pumpkin and lentils," reports TIME New Delhi Correspondent James Shepherd. "Queues of sev eral hundred emaciated people at each kitchen get what is often no more than a quarter-pound of the gruel, and sometimes that is shared among six people. In one village, a shame faced elder confessed that Hindus were violating the ban on eating cows and were consuming dead cattle and buffaloes. 'What else can we do?' he implored pathetically."

Even the beggars of Calcutta are better off than the estimated 15 million people now starving in West Bengal. "In the Kutch district of drought-stricken Gujarat," adds Shepherd, "peasants patiently wait for dogs and vultures to finish picking at the carcasses of dead cattle. The hungry gather up the bones and sell them to mills where they are made into bone dust, a kind of fertilizer."

In Bangladesh, there are barely rations to provide even gruel for the starving in Dacca's crowded refugee camps. Children are so emaciated—their flesh clinging to their brittle bones—that they almost look like deformed infants. Shortages of vitamin A, iron and iodine in India and Bangladesh are increasing the incidence—especially among the young—of goiter, blindness and cretinism.

In Africa's Sahel, the rains last June broke a six-year drought, but the area's 25 million inhabitants are not yet out of danger. Ten million people still suffer from malnutrition and will need outside aid for at least two years. "Of the estimated 4 million refugees in grim, barren camps," reports TIME Correspondent Lee Griggs, "many are young children, their bodies already so malnourished that they are easy prey to diseases ranging from measles to meningitis to pneumonia. Often they find it too difficult to eat or drink with out assistance." At least 3 million nomads—mostly Fulani and Tuareg tribesmen—have lost their entire herds of cattle, sheep, goats and even camels. Though many nomads have begun returning to their traditional grazing lands, it will take them at least five years to rebuild their stocks.

If drought struck again, the Sahel could probably count on foreign help similar to this year's 34-nation relief operation, which delivered 560,000 tons of food—one-third of it from the U.S. What is doubtful, however, is whether an emergency aid effort could rescue the tens of millions of potential starvation victims in case of disastrous harvests in India, China or another heavily populated country. There is probably not enough elasticity in the world food production and distribution systems to do that now, despite the impressive gains that agriculture has made in the past quarter-century.