NIGER: Red bracelets worn by the children look almost like decorations, until a man explains they are used to tag infants suffering from the more advanced stages of starvation.
Cradled in their mothers' arms, the youngest victims of Niger's food crisis don't really need such wristbands - their slack faces, patchy hair and frightened eyes are sign enough that they could die if left to go hungry much longer.
"There's nothing here. If we had a little money we could buy millet and pound it into porridge for the children," said Yeya Doumma (51), an elder in the village of Darbani. "We have no money. There's nothing in the fields."
Darbani, about 120km (75 miles) northwest of the capital, Niamey, is just one of thousands of villages where an estimated 3.6 million people are facing severe food shortages after drought and locusts destroyed last year's crop.
As in the rest of Niger, it is the women who look after the children. The hunger has driven almost every man to the cities or nearby Nigeria, Benin or Ghana in search of work.
Responding to a call broadcast on a loudspeaker above a mosque sculpted of mud, mothers emerged from their huts with children sorted by colour-coded armlets into two categories.
The 200 or so children given red bracelets by aid workers are considered "severely malnourished", a medical condition that can lead rapidly to illness and death. They are just a few of the 150,000 infants estimated to be in that state in Niger.
A second group in Darbani bear yellow tags, meaning they are "moderately" malnourished - tortured by hunger pangs, but likely, for now, to survive. Across the country, there may be a further 700,000 children like them.
Women in Darbani are desperate. "We don't have a single grain of millet," said Saley Tahirou (40), holding her son. "I don't know where to go."
Villagers here are in some ways lucky - an aid agency called Plan Niger has stacked sacks of Indian rice along with vitamin-rich flour in a hut locked with a metal door, to be carefully rationed to children each day.
Many are less fortunate. Even in good years more than a million people in the country of 12 million may go hungry, but aid agencies say a slow response by rich countries has allowed this year's worse-than-usual crisis to become an emergency.
Some relief workers say privately that the government bears a share of the blame for not sounding louder alarms, or distributing free food earlier, allowing malnutrition to soar.
"He's hungry, he's sick," said Hawa Hamadou (35), cradling a boy clutching a clear polythene bag containing wild fruits from nearby trees. "We're just hoping for a good rainy season."
This year, as every year, the village is at the mercy of the clouds. Rain has already teased the first stalks of millet out of the soil, giving hope, but no guarantee, that October's crop will be better.
Farmers wept as a swarm of locusts - so thick that it blotted out the sun - devoured last year's crop. Now only the odd cricket dances through the air, but the threat remains. For Darbani's children, one or two of whom chew a stick, or a scrap of plastic, there is nothing to do but wait.