One of the realities of a famine, unpalatable to many outsiders, is the fact there can be hunger in one part of the country and seemingly plenty in another and one of the main reasons for the imbalance is a lack of transport.

Last Friday the government signed a contract with trucking companies to mobilise 100 vehicles to ship grain from warehouses in areas where there is food to areas where there are shortages.

ETHIOPIA LAND OF WANT AND PLENTY

The transport problems highlight the fact that children may be starving to death in parts of Ethiopia's arid Somali region, but it is not for an absolute want of national resources.

Instead food experts talk about a "pipeline" of food and argue that delays or "slippage" in the steady flow of relief has caused the crisis in the southeast.

"You could say that something is wrong with the system and there is a need for donors to respond with greater flexibility," said Mark Bidder of the U.N.'s Emergencies Unit for Ethiopia.

He argued that greater use should be made of food sold on the open market from areas of Ethiopia and eastern Sudan which produce a surplus.

Pledges of food by the European Union and other donors can take many months to arrive by sea to ports in Djibouti and Somalia and in the meantime reserve food stocks such as the Nazareth warehouses are put to use.

Ironically, the seeming plenty of the government's food reserves is actually the remnants of what should be a far bigger stock of grain -- Ethiopia's food bank is low on credit.

NAZARETH HERDERS WAIT FOR WATER

On the road to Nazareth, the dry bed of the Lume river winds through a valley and out into a vast, parched landscape. Scores of herders and hundreds of cattle and goats wait at a well by the river to drink.

"Our fathers and mothers are at home because they can't walk, but we are here from dawn every morning to line up and get water," Hailu Ghebre told Reuters. Aside from one brief shower last week there has been no rain since September, he said as the animals kicked up a cloud of dust.

"There has been an adequate response by the world. We have had food supplies there," Annan said, adding: "They have not been distributed properly." "It is a tough terrain and Ethiopia is a huge country, but the government could have done a better job of distribution."

Approximately 8 million people in Ethiopia are estimated to be facing starvation after three years of drought, which has dried out most wells and killed much of the region's livestock. Ethiopian authorities have claimed that a delayed international response to the famine has depleted emergency food stocks and prevented the rapid distribution of aid.

According to UNICEF, around 900,000 tons of emergency food supplies are urgently needed.

But Annan maintained that a swift response to the famine had been impeded by a sporadic border war between Ethiopia and Eritrea that has caused thousands of deaths since May 1998 and closed many access routes to afflicted areas, particularly in the parched southeast of Ethiopia.

"The World Food Program wants to use the Eritrean port of Massawa for supplies, but it is closed by war," he said.

Annan went on to make a stinging attack on Africa's political leaders, accusing them of avarice, megalomania and failure to work toward better living conditions in their countries.

"The quality of the leaders, the misery they have brought to their people and my inability to work with them to turn the situation around are very depressing," he declared.

The Ethiopian agency Ogaden Welfare Society (OWS), which is supervising emergency supplies for the World Food Programme, said that April's aid consignment has yet to arrive. OWS distributed 4.5 kilos (10 pounds) of maize and flour to each of around 25,000 starving people near the town of Gode, 500 kilometres (310 miles) southeast of Addis Ababa, in February and March.

But they now have only emergency supplies for around 2,000 sick children in a special nutritional camp. "These children can only be saved in a therapeutic feeding programme. What makes it very expensive or impossible to open the therapeutic feeding programme is the lack of potable water," an OWS official said.

The Ethiopian authorities said that the distribution of the aid has now begun, but downstream of Gode the situation in the Shabelle valley has been made more critical by the arrival of more than 12,000 Somali refugees.

The Somalis have crossed the border into Ethiopia in a desperate bid to reach the last river in the area not to have dried up in the crippling drought, aid charity sources said.

The Somalis from the province of Bakool face starvation after all their cows, goats and sheep died of hunger. The waters of the Shabelle are their last hope, but in Somalia it flows through the territory of a rival clan militia.

Bakool's herdsmen belong to the Rahanwein clan, at war since 1991 with Somali strongman Hussein Mohamed Aidid's clan, which controls access to the Shabelle.

Facing death, the Bakool Somalis have begun crossing the border into neighbouring Ethiopia, where they are packed into refugee camps, near the small town of Kelafo, which sits on the Shabelle 600 kilometres (375 miles) southeast of Addis Ababa.

In one camp, run by the Italian medical relief agency CCM and the local group Guardian (Somali-Ethiopian Relief and Rehabilitation Organisation), the majority of the refugees are woman, children and old men, suffering from various degrees of malnutrition, tuberculosis and dysentry, according to the camp director Doctor Renzo Bozzo.

The menfolk are outside the camp working in the fields, where the agencies have set up an irrigation programme, explained Korja Garane Ahmen, Guardian's executive chairman. "These are the same populations on both sides of the border. They speak the same language and we buy a lot from them despite the war," he added.

Until three years ago the herders sold cattle and sheep to Saudi Arabia through the market in the Somali capital Mogadishu. Riyahd has now banned this trade, according to Mark Biebber of the United Nations Development Programme, after some of the animals were found to be infected with Rift Valley Fever, which is contagious and fatal in humans.

But the Somalis arrived in Kelafo without any animals, which have almost all died of hunger, like those of their Ethiopian neighbours. The Ethiopian disaster prevention committee (DPPC) that after three years without rain in the Ogaden region 90 percent of the cattle and 70 percent of the sheep owned by the rural population have died.

The 95 kilometre (60 mile) road from the provincial capital Gode to Kelafo is lined with the corpses of dead cattle, sheep and even camels.

Now Ethiopians and Somalis alike are clustered on the banks of the Shabelle around Kelafo with what animals remain. But even here their miseries continue to multiply.

The minister will be joined by personnel from his office, the Jewish Agency, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), and Jewish American organizations, on the first official visit to Ethiopia by an Israeli cabinet minister. Deputy Defense Minister Ephraim Sneh visited previously, but not in an official capacity.

There is much debate within the Jewish community, both here and in the United States, over how many of the Falash Mura - whose numbers are estimated at 26,000 but could in fact be much higher - are eligible to immigrate under the Law of Return. Descendants of Jews who converted to Christianity some 100 years ago, the Falash Mura are living in and around compounds set up in Addis Ababa and Gondar.

"The gap between those who are saying that 100 percent of them are eligible, and those who are saying that 5% are eligible, is very big," Sharansky told The Jerusalem Post. "So I'm going to try to have a more exact estimate."

In addition, he said, he hopes to find out "how the work has to be organized there, and what kind of team has to be there" in order to check those who want to apply for aliyah. At present, there is one woman from the Interior Ministry in Ethiopia - the only country where such a field worker is in place - and another official is expected soon.

"We have to understand what is the optimal number of people to have there, and how we have to reorganize the work of the department here to make this checking [procedure] as smooth as possible," Sharansky said.

"Probably we'll start, as we agreed with the Jewish organizations in America, with a kind of statistical checking to try to estimate what is closer to the truth, 5 percent or 100%, because then it is easier to make a budget."

At the fourth session of their joint ministerial committee which concluded here Wednesday morning, the two countries agreed to form a joint committee that will meet on a biannual basis to review the implementation of the resolutions passed by the ministerial committee, said a press release issued after the session.

The two sides agreed to activate that Sudanese-Ethiopian Border Commission so as to encourage the passenger and cargo movement between the two neighbors as well as to solve border disputes.

A number of documents were also signed at the session, held at the Sudanese Foreign Ministry and co-chaired by

Sudanese Foreign minister Mustafa Othman Ismail and his Ethiopian counterpart Seyoum Mesfin.

The documents provide for enhancing cooperation in the areas of petroleum, transport, communication, water resources, industry and trade.

Mesfin also expressed his country's support for efforts to settle the Sudan conflict.