Still, Africa does have its version of the Internet. Only it's called radio. Community radio stations reach "our most important audience, the illiterate and hungry," says Jeane-Pierre Ilboudo, a UN Food and Agriculture Organization official and a specialist on communications and education.

"Africa is so steeped in oral culture that the only limit is people's creativity, and there's plenty of that," he adds.

A principal reason for FAO's interest in electronic communications is the absolute necessity of enhancing food security. This can be done in part through information and education for on-the-spot producers, relayed to them in radio broadcasts.

In New York, radio and TV professionals in the UN department of public information, hold training sessions annually for broadcasters from developing countries. Some of the teachers have themselves graduated from community radio in Africa and moved on to Europe and the US, gaining knowledge and expeience as they went.

For its part, FAO recently teamed with two nongovernmental organizations specializing in community radio also to provide practical, focused help. One of these is the World Association of Community Broadcasters; the other, the Developing Countries Farm Radio Network, which teaches radio production and script writing aimed at improving food crops and public health.

A food security news agency is in the works, with correspondents from Amarc member stations, initially in Africa but, eventually, all over. This service will disseminate material supplied by FAO but tailored for radio.

For Amarc, which used to concentrate mainly on human rights questions, this is a shift that reflects the association's recognition that a fully belly is also a human right. "We are talking about the right of the population to be informed and to be heard about food security," says Michelle Ntab, Amarc's Africa Director. "It is a right that FAO members need to support, not just with words but with legislation and money."

Notwithstanding Kofi Annan and others in the UN who are striving to extend the reach of the Internet, strong-arm governments are not all that happy about that trend. Their misgivings apply also to community radio, says Ntab. She believes resistance may reflect authoritarian leaders' fears about radio's capacity to empower those who formerly were voiceless.

Community stations, typically, have deliberately set up in regions where corruption and unequal access to land and resources accounted for much local food insecurity.

"Community radio is about empowement," Ntab says. "The microphone changes lives."

Kady Souley Boncano of Radio Anfani in the African state of Niger sees radio as a valuable weapon in the struggle for women's rights.

"When I interview women, I often have to hide because the men don't want them to stand up and be heard," she says. "But the women are the ones who produce the food [in Africa]. Most of them are illiterate, and if they can't be told which seeds are good, they will simply plant bad seeds again and again."

At an FAO workshop in Rome attended by broadcasters from Tanzania, South Africa, Mali and Niger, a Web site dedicated to community radio was launched, but officials acknowlege that its scope will be limited by the relatively high cost of access for poor countries. Of course, price is a main reason for the persistent digital divide.

Community radio doesn't come cheap, either. Abdoul Karim Sow of Nige's Radio Jamana Nioro du Sahel says his station's reliance on one small generator limits air time to 10 hours a day.

Another participant in the Rome workshop, Martin Ole Sanago of Olkonerei FM in Maasailand, Tanzania has no telephone. He drives 60 miles to Arusha once a week to log on to the Web. But he still can't afford to surf.

Thanks in part to those millions of workers who commute daily by car, radio has been undergoing a resurgence, too, in the US. Now, satellite radio beamed specifically at specially equipped automobiles is seen to be the wave of the future. For all the junk that's broadcast, there remains a large and loyal audience for noncommercial radio, which is also what the African community stations are.

KDKA in Pittsburgh is often cited as the granddaddy of American radio, with regular broadcasts that began on Nov. 2, 1920 with the presidential election returns. But historians say WHA at the University of Wisconsin in Madison may be the oldest station anywhere. It began transmissions in 1916 and remained on the air by special arrangement after the US Navy prohibited civilian broadcasts in 1917 because of the war.

New York may be the only city to have had its own municipal broadcasting system. A highlight in its long career was Mayor Fiorello H. Laguardia's taking to the air to read and dramatize the Sunday comics to deprived kids during a newspaper strike. Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, though considering himself almost a reincarnated Laguardia, sold the stations -- WNYC-AM and FM -- to a private group, on the ground that the city (and, therefore, its taxpayers) had no business being in broadcast ownership. The final payment on the multimillion-dollar sale is due early this month and a last-minute fund-raiser is under way.

The stations, which produce a substantial amount of individual material, some of it award-winning, remain part of and supply to the National Public Radio network.