Just as India is recovering from the devastating cyclone that ripped through the east last November, wells have recently dried up and crops have withered in the drought afflicting the nation's sun-blistered west and central regions.

Today, up to 80 million people lack water, and hundreds of thousands of animals are perishing in what locals call the worst drought in a century.

Large parts of western and central India, particularly Gujarat and Rajasthan states, have been hardest hit by the crisis. Officials say it is impossible to estimate how many people have died, but urge international intervention to stem acute hunger, mass exodus, and locust invasions.

In past weeks, the ravaging drought has also spread to neighboring Pakistan and Afghanistan. The worst-affected areas have not seen adequate rainfall for up to eight years, officials say.

Khalid Mansour of the World Food Program in Afghanistan emphasizes just how dire the circumstances are. "When [even] a camel dies from lack of water, it is a drought."

International relief organization Oxfam, after its experts had visited the worst-hit districts in Pakistan, said earlier this month that over the past three years some 90 percent of livestock had died.

One-third of all our food—fruits and vegetables—would not exist without pollinators visiting flowers. But honeybees, the primary species that fertilizes food-producing plants, have suffered dramatic declines in recent years, mostly from afflictions introduced by humans. Domestic honeybees have lost as many as one-third of their hives and their wild cousins have become virtually extinct in many places around the world. A variety of troubles threaten the pollinators: Endless waves of development destroy nesting and feeding grounds; pesticides decimate them along with other beneficial insects.

Agribusiness increasingly treats honeybees as a mass commodity, exposing them to uncontrollable plagues of pests. Researcher Steve Buchman has seen fewer and fewer pollinators during travels that have taken him from the Sonoran Desert to the Malaysian rainforests. "I was hearing from other floral biologists around the world and they were seeing the same thing," Buchman said.

GODE, Ethiopia—A famine is in the making in the arid reaches of Africa’s Horn. Children by the hundreds already have perished in southeastern Ethiopia, and aid agencies are mounting a massive effort to prevent the country from once again becoming a synonym for starvation.

The United Nations warns that as many as 16 million people are at risk in 10 countries across East and central Africa, from Burundi to Eritrea on the Red Sea. But the crisis is unfolding most dramatically here in Ethiopia’s perennially thirsty Ogaden region, where three years of drought turned wells steadily saltier, then dried them up.

Cattle and sheep died first, impoverishing the nomadic herding population. The final harbinger of disaster arrived in January when camels, who take months to die, stopped lactating. Their milk is the staple of the small children who now lie struggling for breath on the mat on the floor of a makeshift feeding center in Gode.

Two hundred children younger than 5 died here in March, local officials say. In two nearby towns, children have been dying at the rate of a dozen a day since February.

The incipient famine is but the latest crisis in a country that ranks as nearly the poorest in the world, and has been struggling to finance a protracted border war with Eritrea. Ethiopia also has battled forest fires in the south for weeks.

As aid agencies arrive in the remote and sometimes insecure area near the Somalia border, UN relief officials said the fear is that the crisis will repeat itself elsewhere in this nation of 60 million. The April rains that should be renewing parched fields have, once again, failed to do so.

Water, the stuff of life, has become the source of dangerous friction, with developing nations jousting over water supplies as their populations soar and their environment deteriorates.

"Worldwide, at least 214 rivers flow through two or more countries, but no enforceable law governs the allocation and use of international waters," Sandra Postel, a senior researcher for the Worldwatch Institute, points out.

According to the World Commission on Water, a 20-percent increase in fresh water will be needed by 2025, when the world’s population of six billion people is expected to have increased by three billion.

Ismail Serageldin, vice president of the World Bank, made an ominous prediction in 1995: "Many of the wars of this century were about oil—but the wars of the next century will be about water."

The biggest flash point is the Middle East, a region that is predominantly desert in climate, has a huge rate of population growth, shrinking aquifers and a seething tradition of strife.

"He turned the desert into pools of water and the parched ground into flowing springs; there He brought the hungry to live, and they founded a city.… They sowed fields and planted vineyards that yielded a fruitful harvest."

Thus states Psalm 107. It was written in praise of God, though it could as well refer to modern engineers making their own bid to turn Egypt's deserts into gardens.

Work is to begin on canals intended to siphon millions of cubic meters of the Nile daily and channel them into the Western Desert--transforming thousands of square miles of "the howling waste" into farms brimming with fruits and other crops.

But the plan involves a commodity--fresh water--that is becoming worryingly scarce in the Third World. Many observers fear war could erupt as Egypt and its neighbors--Sudan, Ethiopia and Eritrea--struggle for access to the Nile's dwindling waters.

Egypt plans to divert an annual 5.5 billion cubic meters of Nile water into canals to turn four million hectares of sand into prime agricultural land. Egypt recently threatened to attack Ethiopia for taking too much from the Nile. Now it wants to increase its own 55.5 billion cubic meters annual extraction. World Bank vice-president Ismail Seageldin says: "Many wars this century were about oil, but the wars of the next century will be about water."

Seven percent of the world's population has not enough water. By 2050, this will be 70 percent. Yet our planet has 1,400 million million million liters of water: 100 billion liters a head. But 97 percent is salty and much of the rest is trapped underground or stored as polar ice. Only 0.8 percent of the Earth's water is accessible--and drinkable: about a billion billion liters.

It is enough on average. But some countries have too much. Others have too little.

Iraqi health authorities said that 10,295 people died in November due to health problems resulting from sanctions imposed by the United Nations. The ministry said the latest figures brought to nearly 1,215,787 the number of Iraqis who have died of health problems caused by the sanctions over the past nine years.