By December 31, this year’s death toll from hunger in southern and eastern Africa will reach more than 300,000. Next year could see even more deaths. At least 30 million Africans are threatened by food shortages. Within the next year, this food emergency threatens to dwarf the famine in 1984-85, which killed more than one million Africans and captured global attention.

"The disaster we had 1984-1985, the number involved was roughly a third to one half of the number of people involved now," said Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi. “So if that was a nightmare, this will be too ghastly to contemplate.”

In India, more than 350 million people go to bed hungry every night despite a national wheat surplus of more than 50 million metric tons. In Central America, a year-long drought has affected more than 80 million people.

While the threat is greater, many humanitarian agencies like World Vision are better poised to respond to major food shortages like the ones in Africa, India and Central America.

“Aid groups like World Vision are far more organized to respond to major food emergencies now than they were in 1983, when the Ethiopia crisis first broke into our consciousness,” said World Vision relief specialist Randy Strash. “Today, our relief team has more than doubled, plus we have multiple teams in many countries with enough experience that they can handle most emergencies quickly with little, if any, on-site help from outside.”