It's the children and babies your heart goes out to most, and to mothers who stare vacantly at you as they try to suckle babes at dried-up breasts . . . Watching people die slowly from starvation is worse than watching them die quickly in war. The look of utter despair on their faces is something I'll never forget.

So read the files of TIME's Nairobi Bureau Chief Lee Griggs, who has logged 15,000 miles over the past year and a half on what he describes as "a terribly depressing" assignment: covering drought and famine in Africa's sub-Sahara.

The African agony may be only the first act of a world tragedy. Since 1972, droughts, floods, frosts and runaway fuel and fertilizer prices have wiped out farm surpluses and now threaten the swelling populations of many underdeveloped countries with mass death by famine. To examine that stark prospect, as the United Nations convenes the first global food conference in Rome this week, TIME presents a special report: The World Food Crisis.

For the report, correspondents in the U.S., Europe and India interviewed agronomists, nutrition experts and government officials. In Rome, TIME's Erik Amfitheatrof went through stacks of U.N. documents to find the key statistics for the principal stories on the crisis and possible solutions, written by Associate Editor Burton Pines of the World section. In a team approach we often use on major projects, other departments joined in: articles on climate changes and the process of starving to death were contributed by Science Writer Frederic Golden and Medicine Writer Peter Stoler with back-up from Reporter-Researchers Allan Hill, Brigid O'Hara-Forster and F. Sydnor Vanderschmidt. Supervising the entire report was Senior Editor Marshall Loeb.

Few of those involved in the project were unmoved by the jarring mathematics of starvation. Yet, as Pines concludes, aid alone will not avert future famines: "The crisis will get worse until we in the West demand that the underdeveloped countries decrease their population growth."

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