If you think that the global food crisis is taking a toll on countries like Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Mexico, imagine what its like for those living in Ethiopia. Alex Perry’s report from Kersa, Ethiopia for Time Magazine paints a grim picture:

The day photographer Thomas Dworzak and I arrived at Kuyera, four children died. There were four more the next day…. On that first day, I glimpsed Ayano in the intensive care room, wrapped in a red and blue blanker, struggling to breathe, his eyes tipped back into his skull. When I next saw him, he was trussed up the blanket that had become his death shroud, lying on a slab next to two other small bundles in the morgue…. For five days, we turned our hired SUV into an ambulance, ferrying bodies of dead children back to their villages, picking up the starving and taking them to Kuyera.

Ethiopia faces a major crisis — chronic drought coupled with food prices that have risen 330 percent in the past year and a population that has doubled in size since the mid-1980s.

Yet nature alone is not to blame for Ethiopia's food crisis. Some argue that the government's tight control of the agricultural sector that puts all land under state ownership exacerbates Ethiopia's food insecurity. The distribution of fertilizer and seeds are government-controlled, and while farmers can choose what they want to grow, the Los Angeles Times reports that some 20,000 agricultural advisors, also functioning as tax collectors, keep close tabs of what is being grown.

This week, the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said that "despite the best efforts of the government and humanitarian community to respond to the crisis the needs of people continue to far outstrip the resources available to hand."

Yet surrounding the famine are lush fields of green — feeding goats and cattle — while children continue to die of hunger. It is the harsh reality of what is being called "green hunger" or "green drought" — starvation amidst plenty. A recent BBC article describes it as "the time when the land is full of new shoots but there is no food. It happens because the last rains failed and few crops were planted."

Images posted by Reuters photographer Radu Sigheti puts a face to the crisis in an intimate visit with the Mohamed family during the loss of their young daughter, Michu, who died of malnutrition.

Other children will likely suffer the same fate. Recent government figures estimate some 75,000 children under the age of five in the country are severely malnourished. Among all Ethiopians, more than 4.5 million are in need of emergency food aid.

Now is the time for us to help fill Ethiopia's need. As Mark Lang from the Christian relief agency Tearfund writes in the Times Online, "This is no time to give Ethiopians a compassion fatigued brush-off."

Photo: guuleed (Flickr)

Millions are on the edge of starvation in the Horn of Africa due in part to severe drought. Photo: Filipe Moreira (flickr)

Somalia and Ethiopia are hovering at the edge of famine.

The Washington Post reported on the crisis in the “hungry horn” of Africa last week. In Somalia, U.N. officials predict that half of the population, about 3.5 million people, will need food aid. The New York Times explains the hunger is driven by rampant political insecurity, spikes in global food prices, devaluation of the local currency, and a severe drought.

The World Food Program is struggling to keep up, having already doubled the amount of food it distributes in Somalia and needing an additional 369,000 metric tons of food in Ethiopa. But Doctors Without Borders, a medical aid organization, says the situation just keeps getting worse as cereal prices in the Horn in the last year surged by as much as 375 percent. To make things worse, the drought has killed of most livestock, forcing formerly self-sufficient people to wait in line for food aid.

The next rainy season isn’t due till October, and the wells and watering holes that the people and animals depend on during the dry season are already drying up. Even the camels are hard pressed to survive.

Mercy Corps' country director in Somalia says "It's a life or death situation right now." A 72-year-old herder says it's "the worst I've ever seen."

International Medical Corps, another international medical aid organization in Somalia, is predicting grave starvation risks, with a recent 400 percent rise in the number of severely malnourished young children.

And the current drought — and its problems — are probably here to stay. Researchers have discovered that global warming is drying out the Horn of Africa — and it's happening much faster than anyone anticipated.

What will happen when current drought becomes a permanent shift to desert conditions? Somalia is only the first. Ethiopia is soon to follow.

Whether it is Somalia’s food crisis, the multi-year drought in Australia, or flooding in the American bread basket, climate change is going to vastly affect the world’s food markets.