And I'm Katie O'Toole. Most Americans sat down last week to traditional Thanksgiving dinners. In some parts of the world, however, the standard meal has become an amount of rice this size, and two or three days may go by before another scoop of rice is available. The scant food supply is due to famine. A famine is an extreme scarcity of food.
Hunger is no stranger to the needy people in many parts of the world.
But painful, slow deaths by starvation are becoming common in some countries. Nowhere is the picture bleaker than in Sudan, a country in eastern Africa that is suffering through one of the worst famines in memory. For almost two years, barely a drop of rain has fallen on Sudanese fields, so crops have withered away long before the harvest season arrives. Adding to the devastation is a civil war that's been going on for 15 years between the north and south in Sudan. Many people have become refugees, so they have no fields to plant even if the rains should return to Sudan.