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The consequences of soaring food prices -- starvation, malnourishment, riots and unrest -- are hitting millions of people around the world. The causes of the current crisis are complex, but the effects on people are clear, as is the need for solutions. The United Nations is among those taking the lead in responding to this challenge.

Listen to the stories from Irrigation, Rural Livelihoods and Agricultural Development Project and Rural Livelihoods Support Programme

From the begging bowl to the bread basket: in just two years, Malawi has gone from famine to food surplus - according to national statistics.

BLANTYRE, 2 avril (IPS) - Les producteurs de tabac malawiens rencontrent de plus en plus de difficultés en raison de la baisse des prix sur le marché et du succès croissant des campagnes mondiales contre le tabagisme. Depuis plusieurs mois, les autorités tentent d'encourager la diversification des cultures.

In southern Malawi Oxfam is working in partnership with the World Food Programme to provide food to more than 300,000 of the most vulnerable people. Each household receives maize, oil and pulses each month.

Malawi is one of the poorest countries in the world. Life expectancy is 39 years and falling due to HIV/AIDS. Poverty is endemic with many people caught in a deepening cycle of deprivation.

Every year, during difficult times, people look for ganyu (piecework) to earn money for food or for extras they need. They usually work on other people's land, weeding or preparing it for the next planting season.

Many families in Malawi are looking after extended family members which makes the current food shortages even more difficult for them to cope with.

Justin, a 14-year-old boy from the Ndirande Township on the outskirts of Blantyre, Malawi, has a lot of responsibility for a boy his age.

In a small district hospital of Kasungu, central Malawi, Kate is wrapping her three-day-old son in a yellow blanket. She smiles at her baby, oblivious to her environment. She doesn’t notice the green mosquito net that hangs above her bed, like a colourful detail in the white room. This detail could save her son’s life.

For Chief Dzobwe, the traditional leader of a small cluster of settlements outside the central tobacco heartland of Kasungu, some 100 kilometres north of the capital, Lilongwe, this year's famine is historic.

The causes of Malawi's food shortages are complex. They stem mainly from two consecutive years of crop failure due to: excessive rains or flooding, poor distribution of rainfall, early cessation of rains, degraded soils, non affordability of farm inputs, low crop diversification (maize being the main food crop and tobacco the main cash crop), depressed prices, and high consumption of premature maize.