In the lakeside capital of the central African country of Burundi, 40-year-old Lucie Nahimana fed her family of six "black flour," a low-quality cassava root that many there have resorted to eating because they can't afford anything else.

Thousands of miles away, in the port city of Tianjin, China, physician Ning Aimin scanned the shelves of her supermarket for yogurt, a food that was practically unheard of there a decade ago but has become a favorite of many of China's newly affluent.

On a chilly highway outside Gualeguaychu, Argentina, 10 trucks carrying enough rice to feed 3 million people in one day sat stranded on the side of the road, casualties of a 100-day farm strike that has paralyzed that country's giant grain industry.

These three episodes, all on June 19, are interconnecting pieces of what has emerged as one of the biggest challenges facing the planet: how to feed humanity in this age of skyrocketing food and energy prices.

The problem is a global one, in which a breakdown anywhere in the food chain sets dire consequences in motion and in which the root causes range from rising consumption in Asia to growing biofuel production in the United States and Europe to dwindling supplies of water in the Middle East.

"The world is running now to keep up with demand," said Abdolreza Abbassian, a grain analyst with the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. "Any interruption in the global picture affects supplies."

Already, about 800 million people around the world suffer from chronic food shortages, and millions more could go hungry because of the widening food crisis.

Rising food prices hit the urban poor the hardest, those who throng the slums of the sprawling capitals of Nigeria, the Philippines and Venezuela.

From 2007 to 2008, world prices for soybeans increased by 29 percent, while prices for wheat rose 40 percent and rice prices 53 percent, according to a World Bank study. Food prices had stayed largely stable from 1995 until the end of 2006, the study found.

The recent price spike was the result of problems such as unfavorable weather in grain-exporting countries such as Australia and dwindling food stocks in Europe, according to the U.N. food organization. The coming year's food stocks promise to be thin as well, with floods in the U.S. Midwest and political turmoil in Argentina cutting back grain production.

Yet the problem is long term, as the world's food-production machine fails to keep up with rising demand. The U.N. organization estimates that the problem won't go away for five to 10 years, and that's only if new technology emerges that increases efficiency and boosts production to meet the rising needs.

"The hope is that these high prices will inspire more production around the world," Abbassian said. "During this transition, however, people in poor countries are going to be the most affected."

That means folks such as Nahimana, who said that her monthly food budget of about $100 bought only about two-thirds of what it used to, prepare meals that are smaller and incredibly basic.

They usually eat just once a day, like most families in Bujumbura these days. Nahimana hasn't bought vegetables for several days, because soaring gas prices have made cabbage and other greens, which must be trucked in from the countryside, far too expensive.

In Burundi, where nine in 10 people live on less than $1 a day, a day's serving of rice or beans now costs more than the average daily wage.

"I know the children are not eating well, and that they go to bed hungry," the mother of four said. "I am afraid for their health."

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