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In her torn shirt and cheap flip-flops, the young street vendor crouches on the sidewalk of Vietnam's biggest city, breathing the fumes of thousands of motorbikes and worrying how to cut her living costs.

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Twenty-nine-year-old Nguyen Thi Bich Hoang says she is growing thinner every day because the soaring price of rice is forcing her to eat smaller meals. In the past few months, she has lost more than four pounds from her already thin frame. She eats rice just once a day, opting instead for watery bowls of noodles for most of her meals, as she wanders the streets with two bamboo baskets on a shoulder pole. At night she pays 50 cents to sleep on a mat in a room with 40 other people.

This week, her life took a turn for the worse. Speculators triggered a doubling of rice prices in Vietnam's markets. Supplies of rice disappeared from many shop shelves, and the country faced its biggest food crisis in 20 years, even though it is the world's second-biggest rice exporter.

"I'm so scared," Ms. Hoang says, her eyes wet, covering her face with her palm-leaf hat so that her customers would not see her tears.

"I don't know what to do now. We can't live without rice. For poor people, a grain of rice is like a pearl."

The global food crisis is impoverishing millions of people like Ms. Hoang who live on the margins of the formal economy. It inflicts hardship by squeezing them in at least two different ways.

First, higher food prices are feeding inflation, which in turn is slowing economic growth and reducing the job possibilities for the poorest of the poor. Vietnam, for example, has been obliged to cut its projected rate of economic growth this year because its inflation rate has jumped to a record 18 per cent.

Ms. Hoang, who hawks mangos and rice-paper salads on the streets of Ho Chi Minh City, sells her salads for just 40 cents each - yet her sales have slowed because her working-class customers have less money in their pockets.

Second, the food crisis is squeezing the poor by increasing their basic costs of living. Last year, Ms. Hoang could afford two meals of rice per day, at a cost of about a dollar a day. Now those same two meals would cost her two dollars a day - an unaffordable amount for a woman who earns only about three dollars a day. So she eats cheaper meals, and quietly goes hungry.

Even after she switched to cheaper noodle meals, Ms. Hoang has seen her income decline. Last year she sent $50 per month to the relatives who are taking care of her two children in her faraway home town, a 12-hour drive from Ho Chi Minh City. This year she is sending home only $30 to $40 per month, which amounts to a severe cutback for her children.

While the urban poor are the hardest hit by the food crisis, the skyrocketing prices are hurting many farmers too - even those who grow rice and might be seen as beneficiaries from the crisis.

Many of Vietnam's farmers have such small plots of land that they can grow only enough rice for their own needs. Yet their costs have skyrocketed because of a sharp rise in farm costs, especially fertilizer and pesticides.

"Our life is more difficult than last year," says Nguyen Thi Van, a rice farmer on a small patch of land near Hanoi in northern Vietnam. "Our harvest is the same size, but our costs have almost doubled. Our difficulties have doubled too."

Ms. Van says she doesn't even have enough money to pay the school fees for her daughter, so she has to rely on help from her parents and her husband's parents. "We barely have enough food for our meals, and we have to put off our purchases," she says.

The World Food Program, the relief agency of the United Nations, has warned that the world's poor are facing a "silent tsunami" of food inflation. The crisis could push another 100 million people into deeper poverty, the WFP estimates.

Because of soaring food prices, the agency's budget can cover only 60 per cent of what it provided last year, forcing it to cut back on school feeding programs for 20 million children. "These are heartbreaking decisions to have to make," WFP executive director Josette Sheeran told reporters last week.