As we Americans watch the financial crisis unfold, and our investments and retirement accounts plunge in value day by day, many of us are feeling an overwhelming sense of fear and helplessness.

We are beginning to reassess plans we've made. Will we have enough for retirement? What about college tuition for the kids? And we can forget about that expensive vacation next summer.

And in our neighborhoods and communities, we are seeing signs of economic stress. People are out of work. Auction signs are sprouting up in front of foreclosed homes. And food pantries are reporting depleted stock as demand for their services rises.

This is a time of great uncertainty and anxiety. But imagine how much worse it would be if we could not afford basic food for our families. If we had to tell our kids that there would be no dinner tonight -- maybe we can eat something at breakfast tomorrow.

This is what life is like for the working poor in sub-Saharan Africa. Poor families in places like Burkina Faso typically spend more than three-quarters of their income just on food. A sack of rice in this West African country that cost $28 this past January is now going for more than $50 -- more than a day laborer makes in a month. And the global food crisis, combined with the world economic meltdown, is only going to make things worse.

As we commemorate World Food Day 2008 tomorrow, it is clear that we are losing ground in our fight to reduce the number of hungry people across the globe. U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates are that this global food crisis has increased the number of people who already suffer from chronic hunger, from 850 million to 982 million. The World Bank says 100 million people have been pushed back into poverty.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. With the hope and optimism of the new millennium, world leaders committed themselves eight years ago to the Millennium Development Goals, which included a target of reducing hunger and ending extreme poverty by 2015.

With just six years and change from that deadline, how sad it is to see the numbers of poor and hungry people rising. And with the current economic turmoil and hundreds of billions of dollars devoted to bailing out huge corporations, the plight of the world's poorest and most hungry people is getting neither the attention nor the funding it deserves.

But this moment of crisis also presents us with an opportunity. In recent years, food on the global market was so inexpensive that many developing countries found it was more cost effective to import food than to produce it themselves.

The global food crisis has brought an end to this era of cheap food, perhaps for good.

Now is the time to help small-scale farmers in sub-Saharan Africa and other regions of extreme hunger to boost local crop production. This will increase farmers' incomes and put more food on the local market, which should lower prices for all.

We can do this by immediately increasing our investment in agricultural research and in direct technical and material support to small-scale farmers. If we act now to provide these farmers with improved varieties of seed, tools and quality fertilizer -- a petroleum-based product that is now prohibitively expensive -- they will see a boost in the production of staple crops. We are already seeing initiatives aimed at rapidly increasing rice production, a staple that until now had mostly been imported from Asia.

But we can't stop with increasing production. If farmers do not have the information or means of marketing their crops, they will not fully benefit from higher yields. If we invest in linking African farmers, most of whom are women, to profitable markets, their families will certainly benefit from the increased income. If storage can be improved, if more processing can be done locally, local food can generate livelihood opportunities for the urban poor, as well as those living on the fringes of the cities. Their children will eat more, and what they eat will be more nutritious. Parents will be able to save money for school fees. Their futures will be more hope-filled.

So instead of feeling despair over the global food crisis, I believe this World Food Day is a call to seize the opportunity before us. With a renewed will and commitment, we will achieve our goal of reducing hunger and ending extreme poverty, and do so in a manner that empowers the least among us to create better futures for their families.

Ken Hackett is president of Baltimore-based Catholic Relief Services, the official international humanitarian agency of the U.S. Catholic community that provides assistance in more than 100 countries around the world.