The power of pictures, this time of young children dying of starvation in Niger, packs a powerful punch. The world is properly responding with an influx of aid from government and private sources.

Troubling, this response comes in the 11th hour. Last winter, the United Nations World Food Program warned of impending disaster in Niger. The world body made two appeals in the spring for emergency food and financial aid to the landlocked nation of 11 million people. But it wasn't until pictures of underweight adults and dying children emerged that an adequate response came. Large-scale distribution of emergency rations and other aid is now headed to the 3.6 million — about 800,000 of them children under age 5 — left without food after a drought and locust infestation destroyed the millet harvest.

Before we move on to the next disaster, long-term strategies for dealing with such global events ought to be created. The kind of ad-hoc approach usually employed may be compassionate, but is unlikely to resolve the problems keeping Niger and other nations at the brink of catastrophe.

A recent report by the International Food Policy Research Institute predicts the number of hungry children in Africa will increase by 3.3 million by 2025 if ongoing aid and investment efforts continue unchanged. The sharpest increase will be in sub-Saharan African, particularly the countries Burkina Faso, Niger, Somalia and Sudan. Conversely, hunger is being abated in North Africa and West Asia.

We shouldn't wait for the pictures of starvation to emerge from these nations to begin passing the hat. U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan proposes a smart solution in the form of a $500 million emergency fund to provide a swift response when the next disaster strikes.

Another solution worth a serious look is the Global Poverty Act of 2005, legislation proposed by Rep. Adam Smith, D-Tacoma. The bill would require the U.S. to align its humanitarian assistance with its foreign policy.

This is a critical piece of the puzzle. The problems facing impoverished nations are myriad. In some cases it is poor governance, in others it is a lack of basic infrastructure that limits access to markets, education and health care.

Investments in roads and communication technologies such as telephones and the Internet are growing. There is President George Bush's laudable Millennium Challenge Account fund coupled with welcomed traction on the issue of debt forgiveness.

An emergency fund and seamless alignment of humanitarian assistance are solutions that would feed the poor for more than a day.