The United Nations classifies Laos as one of the world's "least developed" countries. And no wonder. Half of all children here are chronically malnourished during their first five years of life. They suffer "stunting" as a result. That inelegant term means they do not grow, either physically or mentally. If these children make it to adulthood, they will be small and not very smart. And then there's the 10 percent classified as "wasting" - little children who are, essentially, starving to death. It's quite obvious that the callous, opaque communist government couldn't care less about its children. Over 10 years, the malnourishment statistics have changed little if at all. If not for people like Karin Manente, Lao children would have nothing to hope for.

"There is so much human capacity that is lost here," she laments. Severe malnourishment in early childhood "affects you for the rest of your life."

Manente is Laos country director for the World Food Program, the underappreciated U.N. enterprise that struggles to feed the poorest people in countries governed by obdurate, uncaring leaders.

Among its programs in Laos, the WFP delivers midday meals to 88,000 schoolchildren - a daunting task in a mountainous nation with almost no paved roads. Many villages can be reached only on foot, and the next settlement might be 20 miles away. The problem is, these are the places most in need. These are the children Manente tries to feed. For many, that is the only meal they will get each day.

The Lao People's Democratic Republic doesn't exactly stand in the way. But each year, the WFP gives the government a plan for feeding the schoolchildren, laying out its minimal responsibilities for funding and general assistance.

"But it doesn't all materialize," Manente says, pursing her lips.

That means, to use aid-worker jargon, the school-feeding initiative is entirely "program based." Manente translates.

"It means if we stop, the program stops."

She cannot be expected to be hypercritical of the government. Still, the most generous assessment she can muster is this: "Their people do consume staff time at meetings with us here in Vientiane."

With a government this cold, closed and uncaring, it's little surprise that the people are poor, ill-served and underfed. But no one had ever taken the time to examine exactly what that meant. The WFP weighed and measured thousands of children all over the country to produce a "food insecurity" study, published several months ago. The malnourished children, it concluded, "do badly at school and have low productivity in adulthood." That is, if they survive to adulthood. Just more than 8 percent of all children born here die before they reach age 5. The others "pass on poverty and deprivation to future generations."

Part of the problem is rice. For many of the rural poor, 80 percent of the nation's population, rice is just about the only thing they eat. What happens if you eat only rice? No vegetables, no fruits, no animal protein? Stunting. Wasting. The terrible shame is that it would take very little to save many thousands of these children. If families planted what aid workers call a "kitchen garden," in this tropical climate it could supply vegetables year round. That would help diversify a child's diet. But in the poorest areas, fewer than half the households think to do that because eating only rice is a well-established custom. In one area, Manente told me, "When a baby is born, the mother can eat only rice for three months. That's the tradition." In other words, they don't know any better. Someone needs to tell them. The WFP is running a pilot project in four small villages, and the results are encouraging. "Once you get to them" with this nutritional information, Manente said, "they are receptive." Aid workers aren't capable of educating the public at large. That's the government's responsibility. But that's not what it likes to talk about.

The Lao News Agency happily churns out press releases extolling President Choummaly Sayasone on the occasion of his official visits to Vietnam, North Korea and Burma. During a five-day state visit to New Delhi last week, the service reported that the president and the Indian prime minister discussed "a wide range of subjects of bilateral interest, and issues of regional and international importance." If the averages held, while the president was away on his fine adventure, 167 children died.

Joel Brinkley is a professor of journalism at Stanford University and a former foreign policy correspondent for the New York Times. E-mail Insight at insight@sfchronicle.com. E-mail Brinkley at brinkley@foreign-matters.com.

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