María Antonia León, El Salvador. “Before, I needed $15 weekly to buy the household necessities. Now I need $40, just for food.” Credit: Edgar Orellan

When international food prices reached an all-time peak earlier this year, many clamored to understand the drivers of this alarming trend. Oxfam dove headfirst into the discussion, pointing out the politics behind the food price crisis, and calling for reforms that would help prevent the most vulnerable from catastrophe.

But often missing from these conversations was a real understanding of how the food price crisis is playing out in communities across the globe. It may be easy for the average person to understand the impacts of higher food prices in their own life, but sometimes the big picture is too remote or complex to comprehend. That’s why we created the food price pressure points map, to provide a snapshot of how global prices are hitting home in some of the most vulnerable communities around the world.

Other groups like ActionAid and the Environmental Working Group have done fantastic work to describe the link between biofuels policies and rising prices and show just how vulnerable some countries are to price volatility. We hope our map adds to their great work, and advances this dialogue by providing new insight into the consequences of a broken food system. We also created this map to give people an easy platform to take action. That’s why we made it easily embeddable, just like a YouTube video. We encourage you to steal it, use it, and share it. Check it out and let us know what you think.

Want to put the map on your website or blog? Just go here to copy and paste the code to add this map to your own site.

This post was first published in the Guardian’s Poverty matters blog here.

The worst drought in 45 years, a drought with no end in sight at the moment, is ravaging the south-central US and wreaking havoc on farmers and ranchers who are seeing their crops fail and their cattle suffer from lack of water.

Meanwhile nearly half way around the world in the Horn of Africa, a broad swath of the region – including parts of Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia – is suffering a severe drought that threatens to push millions of people already living on the brink of disaster into a full scale humanitarian crisis.

Even the dry clinical language of the Famine Early Warning System Network (pdf)raises alarm bells:“Households in pastoral and marginal cropping areas in the eastern Horn currently face moderate to extreme levels of food insecurity due to ongoing drought, increasing staple food prices, declining purchasing power and in some areas, limited humanitarian assistance…”

“Current assistance programs are inadequate to mitigate existing and expected food deficits and high malnutrition. In areas with humanitarian access, expanded programming should be implemented to address current and expected food insecurity. However, development of new strategies is critical in order to reach affected households in areas with limited humanitarian access.”

For farmers in the southern US, the drought is surely a disaster that will not only ruin their crops, but holds the possibility of running them out of business. Federal support in the form of crop payments, subsidized crop insurance, possibly disaster payments and an array of other social safety net programmes, will help soften the blow.

Poor farmers and pastoralists in the Horn of Africa face a much different and much deadlier reality. In Ethiopia, 3.2 million people currently need humanitarian assistance; in Kenya 2.4 million people do. And in Somalia, the current drought is compounding an already desperate situation where median prevalence of acute malnutrition was 25% in December last year and has deteriorated since. Without assistance many people, and children especially, will die. The US is responding to this unfolding disaster, for example releasing $80m in food aid to Kenya.

How the US responds to this disaster, or more precisely with what, is the subject of renewed scrutiny thanks to a new report released last week, Delivering Improved nutrition: Recommendations for Changes to U.S. Food Aid Products and Programmes. The study, commissioned in 2008 as part of the farm bill reauthorization, takes a hard look at the commodities the US uses to respond to food insecurity and makes concrete recommendations.

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12 year old Ethiopian farmer, Dereje has a tough task when it comes to protecting his family’s crops from natural threats in Ethiopia’s Simien Mountains. For weeks on end he must sleep outside, often alone, in temperatures below freezing so he can be ready at dawn to defend the family’s livelihood from a daily onslaught of feisty and hungry Gelada Baboons who want to eat his crops.

Dereje’s story is one of many captured beautifully (and in high definition) in the new Discovery Channel show Human Planet, which takes a bold and compelling look at the lengths to which people in extreme circumstances will go to put food on their family’s plates. It’s a stunning portrait of how people around the world eke out their livelihoods under difficult and often dangerous conditions.

But while Human Planet opens our eyes with dramatic and exciting images of ominous and threatening situations, it stops short of articulating the obvious underlying social critique. There’s scant mention of why, in a world where some have immense wealth and opportunity, this 12 year old boy must sleep in the cold by night and fight baboons by day. It’s easy to guess why viewers don’t hear about the more than 30 million people in Ethiopia– nearly half the country’s population – who are undernourished. Because who really wants to think about that on a Sunday night?

There’s no doubt that it’s much harder to craft an exciting show around the immense risk to Ethiopian farmers’ crops from more frequent and extreme droughts resulting from climate change, than it is to show a kid slinging rocks at baboons. And I can’t blame the show’s producers for letting these realities go unspoken; after all, their goal is better ratings not social change. Maybe it’s for the best, as it’s pretty hard to miss the message flowing through each of the vignettes: in some places, economic opportunity is very hard to come by. Sometimes it just takes a few pretty pictures, and some baboons to help that medicine go down.