A malnourished baby cries in his mother's lap inside Medicine Sans Frontieres intensive care unit... 
(Radu Sigheti/Reuters)
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Dahir Abdi Salah used to feed his children three meals a day — pancakes for breakfast, spaghetti for lunch and beans for dinner.
Now, due to a global food crisis that is hitting this impoverished country especially hard, the family eats one meal a day. Other times they drink tea or water to ward off the inevitable hunger pangs.
"They eat porridge once a day," Salah said of his children, ages 2, 5 and 6, who live on the outskirts of Somalia's shattered capital, Mogadishu. "A kilogram (2 pounds) of beans used to cost a few cents — now it's a dollar. You can imagine the difference and how it has affected our lives."
More than 14 million people across the Horn of Africa are relying on food aid and other assistance to survive a devastating drought and rising food prices, aid officials said Tuesday. The crisis is especially dire in Ethiopia and Somalia, two of the poorest countries in the world.
Many are surviving on one meal a day; others choose between feeding their children and sending them to school.
"This had led to more than belt-tightening," Mark Bowden, the U.N.'s aid chief for Somalia, told journalists in Nairobi, Kenya. "People are reducing their food intake ... We have only months before we go into a major crisis."
Bowden estimates that 3.5 million people — half of Somalia's population — will need food assistance by the end of 2008. The U.N. has issued an aid appeal for $637 million for Somalia, but so far has gotten about a third of that.
The worldwide food crisis is threatening to push the number of hungry people in the world toward 1 billion — despite a recent U.N. summit pledge to reduce trade barriers and boost agricultural production.
In the Horn of Africa, food production is also hampered by drought — a double blow for Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, Kenya and Djibouti. In Ethiopia, more than 80 percent of people live off the land.
Peter Smerdon, Nairobi-based spokesman for World Food Program, said there are fears the September-October rains, crucial to ease the crisis here, will not come.
