Photo: Finbarr O'Reilly/Reuters

For months we have been following increasingly urgent reports about food scarcity, rising prices and vulnerable populations. Last week, the World Food Program said the crisis is a silent tsunami that is "threatening to plunge more than 100 million people on every continent into hunger."

The World Food Program says it has never seen a crisis of this proportion. Analysts expect it will be difficult to reverse in the short term. The Financial Times says humanitarian aid at levels comparable to Indonesia's 2004 tsunami response will be needed to prevent the starvation of millions.

For Mercy Corps the increase in food prices is hurting the very people our program staff around the world are working to support.

Reports from those working most closely with affected communities confirm that the situation is dire — and has the potential to grow much worse.

Penny Anderson, Mercy Corps' food security program officer, told OPB radio: "I've been working with Mercy Corps for over eight years now and I have never seen anything like it."

In Niger, prices of bread, powdered milk and wheat flour have spiked, exacerbating the West African nation's precarious food situation. Currently about two-thirds of the population is at serious risk, with shortages pushing the country closer to famine.

In Syria, spiraling food prices have forced Mercy Corps to cut back on the amount of food we can buy and distribute to hundreds of Iraqi refugee families.

In Tajikistan, where Mercy Corps recently distributed blankets and generators to help residents keep warm during an unusually harsh winter, about 40 percent of households in the Rasht Valley are down to no more than one warm meal a day. Neighboring Kazakhstan has suspended wheat exports — shutting off Tajikistan's primary supply of the grain.

Like several other humanitarian aid agencies, Mercy Corps has established a Global Food Crisis fund to help its field teams respond to needs arising from the worst global food crisis in recent memory.

Food distribution line. Photo: L. Boscardi/UNHCR

The UN is preparing plans to ration its food aid to people in need if new donations don't provide more money soon, according to an article in the Financial Times this week. Rising global food prices are putting serious pressures on the World Food Program (WFP)'s budget, to the tune of several million dollars each week.

"The WFP crisis talks come as the body sees the emergence of a "new area of hunger" in developing countries where even middle-class, urban people are being "priced out of the food market" because of rising food prices.

The warning suggests that the price jump in agricultural commodities - such as wheat, corn, rice and soyabeans - is having a wider impact than thought, hitting countries that have previously largely escaped hunger."

It is not just the UN that will have to ration its food aid. Countries like Egypt and Pakistan are reinstating or strengthening rationing systems for the first time in decades. Unfortunately, the crisis will be getting worse in the short term. According to the US Department of Agriculture "high agricultural commodities prices [will] continue for at least the next two to three years."