Whilst many of us are absorbed by the impacts of the recent financial meltdown on jobs and markets, this article points out that a food crisis is continuing to devastate much of the poor world and to reverse some of the historic advances over the past dozen or so years in reducing global poverty. The lack of investment in agriculture, along with the rapid rise in commodity prices and the ravages of the current recession, has now cast an estimated 90 million people back into abject poverty. The total now living in such extreme conditions is once again climbing above one billion, the first absolute increase in the hungry and destitute in a generation.