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Harne Waddaye, a 60-year-old grandmother, digs for food in the bare earth outside the small village of Louga, in the African country of Chad. She is not digging for crops she planted, or even for wild roots. She is raiding ants' nests for the grain the insects have stored. The few grains she is able to gather, along with the leaves from trees her daughter collects, will feed her four children and six grandchildren. It is meager fare.

Harne's story may seem distant or even far-fetched to those of us who live in Hong Kong. But this is the reality for 18 million people at risk of severe hunger across a band of Africa that stretches thousands of kilometers from Senegal in the west to Chad in the center of the continent.

This year has been a bad year with little rain. The year before last was also bad and five years ago the rains also failed. Even in good years, women like Harne resort to raiding ants' nests to feed their families during the "hungry season". Desperate acts such as this are the norm for many in this part of Africa.

The world knows what to do in the short term to save lives and what to do in the long term to secure people's quality of life. The tragedy is that the world fails to do it.

For the short term, we need to act more quickly when we see the warning signs. A report by Oxfam and Save the Children on last year's East Africa food crisis showed that thousands of lives were lost due to slow response to that catastrophe. Acting early to save lives makes not only moral sense but also economic sense. During the 2004-05 food crisis in Niger, the UN's humanitarian chief, Jan Egeland, pointed out that when the warning signs began to appear, it would cost $1 per day to save a child from malnutrition, but once the crisis had fully arisen, it cost $80 a day. Given that governments around the world are concerned whether we are getting the most from every aid dollar, it is perverse that politicians were shown to be so reluctant to act sooner.

A swift response is necessary but not enough. For too long, emergency aid has been colored by the interests of the donors. We need to base our aid on the level of need, not on political interests or television exposure.

In the long term, we need to break the hunger cycle. We can help people build their own ability to withstand crises and look after their families without needing help from outside. Essentially, it comes down to building a strong society and a stable economy.

For the Sahel region, this means dealing with the problem of volatile food prices. In many markets, food is available but due to high prices, it is out of the reach of poor people. Developing food reserves in vulnerable regions will not only get food rapidly to where it is needed, it will also help governments step in to bring down prices before a crisis develops. We also need to help the most vulnerable through programs which provide social safety nets. Finally, there needs to be much more investment in producing food and moving away from a focus on the export of cash crops.

But hunger is not just a foreign concept. Here in Hong Kong, low-income households and disadvantaged groups are battered by soaring food prices. An Oxfam Hong Kong survey finds that one out of every six poor families experiences hunger: there are about 144,400 families - with children aged 15 or below - living below the poverty line, and about 22,970 of them are struggling to put food on the table.

We have to act now - whether we respond to the food crisis in Africa or take action to support policies to assist the poor in Hong Kong - as global citizens we can do no less. Harne and many families like hers have no time to wait. The choice is ours.

The author is director-general of Oxfam HK.

(HK Edition 08/30/2012 page3)