Population Day 3

New arrivals wait to be admitted into Dadaab, the world’s largest complex of refugee camps. The Somalis who reach it have fled war and hunger in their homeland -- only to discover an equally drought-plagued Kenya.  (Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times)

The refugees often arrive at Dadaab weak and sick, such as this child who threw up while waiting to be processed. Nearly 1 billion people in the world are chronically hungry, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. At least 8 million die every year of hunger-related causes, and the young are the most vulnerable. A child dies of hunger every 11 seconds.  (Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times)

Hundreds and sometimes thousands of refugees arrive daily at the complex, which houses nearly half a million people. Thousands of tons of food are distributed in the camps every year, with the U.S. government paying most of the cost.  (Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times)

Men jostle in line at the entrance to one of the Dadaab camps. The lines are segregated to keep the women and children from being trampled.   (Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times)

A child is vaccinated during the admitting process. Many of the children arrive at the camp severely malnourished and some later die there.  (Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times)

A refugee family fashions a tent out of fabric on a lattice of sticks -- a makeshift home inside the razor-wire fence of a Dadaab camp. Though the world produces enough food to sustain its 7 billion residents, hunger persists in developing countries because people can’t afford to buy the food or can’t grow enough on their own.  (Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times)

Shamsa Adow Hassan, who fled war-torn Somalia with her husband and four children, cradles her 2-month-old daughter while waiting to be admitted to Dadaab. “The farms have dried up,” she said of her homeland. “Some people had died of starvation.” The final straw came when a rocket struck and killed her father.  (Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times)

Makeshift homes for refugees at Dadaab. Increasingly, the world’s poor are competing with the appetites of wealthier nations. Some of Africa’s best rain-fed farmland is being snapped up by China and oil-rich Middle Eastern countries trying to secure long-term food supplies.  (Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times)

Schoolchildren wash their hands before getting supplemental high-protein porridge in a Dadaab camp. The camp’s youngest refugees are the most vulnerable to illness from chronic hunger and malnutrition.   (Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times)

Refugees in Dadaab gather outside their tents.  (Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times)

Refugees are held back by workers trying to maintain control of a food line at Dadaab. The camp’s residents are entitled to collect rations every two weeks that are designed to meet basic caloric needs. “We’re going to have to produce more food in the next 40 years than we have the last 10,000,” said William G. Lesher, a former chief economist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. “Some people say we’ll just add more land or more water. But we’re not going to do much of either.”  (Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times)

People lined up to receive food are funneled through tunnels similar to cattle chutes. Through openings at various intervals, aid workers scoop wheat flour, cornmeal, dried peas, soy protein powder and salt into the refugees’ gunnysacks.  (Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times)

Children at Dadaab receive a supplemental meal in an effort to give them the caloric intake they need to grow and survive.  (Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times)

A mug of spilled porridge seeps into the dry ground.  (Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times)

Failed crops dominate parts of the landscape in eastern Kenya. The planet will face major agricultural challenges in coming decades, and though international research projects are underway to help meet them, solutions aren’t likely to be found quickly, if at all. “The easy things have been done,” said Nina V. Fedoroff, a biotechnology expert at Pennsylvania State University. “The problems that are left are hard.”  (Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times)

A female farmer swings a hoe at the parched earth in Mwingi district, in Kenya’s Eastern province. She was digging a trench to retain rainwater, praying it would come soon. Women do much of the hard labor in Africa.  (Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times)

James Mukunga, left, has dealt with years of drought-ruined crops on the small farm he shares with his wife and 12 children in eastern Kenya, about 200 miles from the refugee camps. The family chopped down their few remaining trees to make charcoal to sell.   (Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times)

Workers in the Dadaab complex unload cornmeal provided by the U.S. Agency for International Development. The tons of food supplies used to keep the refugees alive are stored in large, secured buildings.  (Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times)

A camp worker scoops dried peas into the bags of refugees. Scientists hope to someday develop plants that can tolerate salt-contaminated soils, drought and higher temperatures.  (Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times)

A hospital worker at Dadaab’s Ifo camp pinches the loose skin of a child. The hospital operates a “stabilization center” for the children who arrive severely malnourished. Workers first see if the children can take in diluted milk. As they gain strength, the youngsters receive an enriched formula and then a peanut-based paste.  (Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times)

A woman holds a severely malnourished child at the Ifo camp in Dadaab. More people die of hunger-related causes every year than succumb to AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined.  (Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times)

Two-year-old Saad Siyat gasps, near death. When he arrived at the camp from Somalia with seven siblings, he was suffering from pneumonia and chronic undernourishment -- in particular a protein deficiency known as kwashiorkor. The name derives from a West African term for “rejected one,” a child pushed from his mother’s breast to make way for a newborn.  (Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times)

Surjit Singh, a farmer in India’s Punjab state, fell into debt as he spent more to drill deeper for water in ever shorter supply. Now in his 60s, he says retirement is out of the question -- and that he understands why thousands of debt-burdened Indian farmers have committed suicide in recent years.  (Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times)

Singh looks into his abandoned well that went dry. The longtime farmer embraced the so-called Green Revolution in his youth, signing on to a new way of farming that introduced fertilizer, pesticides, hybrid seeds and groundwater pumped out with modern equipment. But such high-intensity agriculture has taken a toll: falling water tables, exhausted or salt-contaminated soils, resistant pests and plumes of fertilizer and pesticides in streams and aquifers.  (Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times)