Global price rises and floods last year have caused severe food shortages in northeast Uganda, where nearly 30 people have died and some have been reduced to eating rats, officials said on Tuesday. The deaths occurred in the remote Karamoja region, an impoverished semi-arid area bordering Kenya and Sudan that is notorious for fighting over livestock and scant resources.

The World Bank has called for greater investment in agriculture in developing countries and stressed that the sector should get extra priority if goals of halving extreme poverty and hunger by 2015 are to be realised. In its latest World Development Report on

Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) launched a special pilot project of training 1000 anganwadi workers of Vidisha district in Madhya Pradesh. Funded by UNICEF, the project is likely to be introduced in 30 districts of Madhya Pradesh. "Vidisha has been selected keeping in view the high rate of malnutrition in the district,' said V.N Rajasekharan Pillai, vice-chancellor, IGNOU.

Use of soya products can fight malnutrition better in both rural and urban areas as, among protein-rich mushroom, spirulina, soybean and pulses, soybean has 40 per cent protein content and provides cheapest protein, says an expert. ''In Madhya Pradesh, a very large section of population in villages is living below poverty line. They are deprived of affordable nutritious food and their food is lacking protein and fat content,'' the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research's former director MS Virdi said.

Children in South Asia are bearing the brunt of spiralling food prices as malnutrition is on the rise with millions at risk, the UN children's fund said. The price of rice and wheat has doubled under the worldwide pinch. Poor households are consuming one less meal or substituting expensive ingredients, David Toole, regional director of UNICEF South Asia, told a press briefing on Tuesday.

About 73 per cent of the street children in the Dhaka city suffer from chronic malnutrition while mortality and morbidity status among the street dwellers has reached an alarming level due to lack of basic healthcare services. This was revealed at a seminar organised in Dhaka on Wednesday by ICDDR,B to release the findings of a study on

RESIDENTS of Dhaka city, and others across the country, see daily lines of hundreds of people in fixed price shops in various neighbourhoods. Being lucky enough to still be insulated from food inflation, I ventured into one of the shops to obtain first hand information. Each outlet has 1,000 kgs of rice, the product most in demand, which are sold in a maximum of 5 kg parcels. The official claimed that there are almost 2,000 such shops in the country with an additional 2,000 more to be opened.

The global food crisis has brought on riots in about a dozen countries and left many panicked world leaders scrambling for answers. Alarming increases in once-affordable basic food staples such as rice, corn, and wheat have made millions more of the world's poor vulnerable to hunger and malnutrition. Past food market emergencies have been mainly regional in scope.

Speakers at a roundtable yesterday said ready-made garment (RMG) workers are subjected to a variety of physical, chemical and biological hazards due to use of natural and synthetic materials in the factories. Wage discrimination, long working hours, unhygienic environment, lack of water and sanitation facilities and inadequate rest and sleeping time are causing malnutrition and many other health problems to garment workers, they added.