AL-BURULLUS, Egypt – A gaggle of peasant women, black caftans wafting in the breeze, crouched in the street over a small tray of fish, just caught but already teeming with flies. In their excited chatter, they sounded as if they had acquired a rarified commodity of untold value. By their own measure they had. The worldwide food crisis has spawned high-level meetings and cogent-sounding strategies proclaimed by leaders of the wealthy nations that caused it. But when looking for results, come to places like this, one of the most impoverished towns in an exceedingly poor country. People who live here, like the women trying to mete out the fish, say, simply: We’re hungry. But no one seems to listen – or care.

A few weeks ago, Cairo appointed a new governor of this northern region, nestled in the Nile River delta where it meets the Mediterranean Sea. He decided it would be more efficient to end the monthly flour ration and give out a few pieces of bread instead. This town’s 80,000 residents greeted the decision with a fury borne not of reasoned principle but of desperate need. Without the flour, most of them simply did not have enough to eat.

“We have our particular circumstances here,” said Taher El-Mahkawi, a fisherman, like most everyone in town. “Without the bread, there is no additional food.”

With the price of grains doubling worldwide, and inflation in Egypt now clawing toward 20 percent, no one here could afford simply to buy the flour. So the people of Burullus rioted; 8,000 of them took to the street. They burned tires and shut down the International Highway that runs from Bardiyah, Libya, in the west, through this town and then east until it stops at the closed gates to the Gaza Strip. That’s when Egyptian riot police stormed into town. They fired tear gas, arrested dozens of town people.

At first the governor, Ahmad Zaki Abdin, hung tough and complained on Egyptian television that, with all the foment, being a governor was “the filthiest of all jobs.” Late last month, he relented – a bit.

No one in Burullus seems to know why they have come to this moment, when they can no longer afford to buy even the most basic rations. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak takes the easy path and blames the United States – an ever-popular connivance here.

“The international community must reassess the real cost of the production of biofuels” and “its consequences for the food security of humans,” he insisted last month.

The United States, of course, offers subsidies, estimated to be worth $11 billion a year, to farmers who grow corn for ethanol production. Hundreds of farmers have switched from growing wheat to corn so they can cash in. Well, Egypt imports much of its wheat from America, and the price has doubled.

Last month, the World Bank estimated that the food crisis has pushed 100 million people worldwide into abject poverty. The International Monetary Fund said that nearly half of the problem results from the diversion of food crops for use in biofuels. A multi-year drought in Australia and the increased costs of fuel used in farming are also to blame. So are the general farm subsidies that the United States and Europe cling to with a tenacious disregard for the rest of the world.

As for the ethanol crops’ role, the Bush administration chooses to downplay or even deny this is so.

“There has been apparently some effect, some unintended consequence, from the alternative fuels effort,” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice grudgingly acknowledged. Congress is complicit in this. But then, from the American perspective, the arguments for ethanol are compelling.

My purpose here is not to say that is wrong – but to remind that every policy has its cost, and this one has it victims, like these people right here in Burullus, a place so poor that skeletal goats root among the street trash to find any sustenance at all. The scene is the same in hundreds of other places worldwide, where millions of people have been thrown into abject destitution as food prices rise.

Several fishermen debated this in a wretched little tea shop, otherwise empty at mid-day. The proprietor served sweet Arab tea brewed with pestiferous water from the Nile. “Capitalism doesn’t look kindly on poor people,” one of them offered, shaking his head.

“The U.S., they have their own problems, and they are trying to solve them,” said another, Abdel Eissa. “But here, in this town, we are totally neglected. We are forgotten.”

Joel Brinkley is a former Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent for The New York Times and now a professor of journalism at Stanford University. Readers may send him e-mail at: brinkleyforeign-matters.com