Agricultural production in the key grain-producing highlands has been disrupted by the conflict, while the situation has been compounded by drought in the northern lowlands, it said.

The report, prepared by the U.N. children's agency UNICEF for the weekend visit of U.N. special envoy Catherine Bertini, said 850,000 Eritreans would need food aid, out of a population of just three million.

In the small northwestern village of Giset, Bertini talked to villagers about three years of drought which have left them perilously short of food.

Bertini is touring the Horn of Africa to respond to the threat of drought-related famine in the region which could affect up to 16 million people this year.

But Giset's problems are not just about a lack of rain. What nobody says, but everybody knows, is how the war has magnified the villagers' problems and stretched their ability to cope to the limit.

"These (lowland) regions are vulnerable to drought... primarily occupied by pastoralists who even at the best of times rely on grains from surplus areas,'' the UNICEF report said.

NO FOOD OR MONEY TO BUY IT

Normally Eritrea's government buys surplus grain from the highlands and sells it cheaply to people of lowland villages like Giset during the dry season.

But this year, hundreds of thousands of people in the highlands have been forced from their homes because of the border war, and are now living in camps. Tens of thousands of Eritrean nationals who have been deported from Ethiopia simply add to the mouths to feed.

The surplus has disappeared. "The people who were producing the food are now themselves reliant on food aid,'' a U.N. official said.

The effect of the war is a sensitive subject for a country which, since independence from Ethiopia in 1993, has always prided itself on its self-reliance.

Eritrea's economy, which used to depend partly on trade with Ethiopia, is also in trouble after nearly two years of war.

Because of the debilitating cost of the conflict on the tiny Red Sea state, the government has little money left.

"The government is not able to purchase whatever food is there, and what it does have it is using to feed people at the front,'' the official said.

The net result of drought and the government's inability to respond is that the price of the staple sorghum has doubled since August last year.

MEN AT WAR

Amna stands nervously at the door of her straw hut, a beautiful orange and black scarf around her head, one had draped over the shoulder of her young daughter.

Her husband, she says through an official translator, left to "find work'' a year ago. Giset is a village of women, children and old men. Like many of his contemporaries, Amna's husband is probably in the army.

"There are 250 to 300,000 people on the frontline,'' the U.N. official said. "Where are all the men coming from?''

Amna's husband sends her $10 "when he can,'' and with this she survives — just about. After her crops failed for the last three years, she has had to gradually sell or eat the 30 goats and 5 cows her family once owned.

But then its unexceptionality is the point. Across the Horn of Africa, and extending into the countries which surround the Abyssinian highlands, some 16 million people are said to be at risk of famine – a number which increases day by day as fresh reports come in from across the region.

The world's media has concentrated its gaze on one place – the lowland desert between Ethiopia and Sudan where drought has turned to famine and the graves of hundreds of young children lie newly turned.

Yet if things have deteriorated more quickly there – producing the television images which seem to be the grim prerequisite for action by the international community – the refugee camps in the towns around Gode do not tell the real story of the starvation which threatens this region on such an epic scale.

It is places like Giset which do that. For most of the millions at risk in Africa are not Gode's desert-fringe nomads whose camels and cows have died, leaving children without the milk which is their chief source of nutrients. The vast majority are like the people of Giset, whose crops have failed for two years running – and for whom the rich donor nations have pledged not one penny in aid despite the launch of an appeal by the United Nation's World Food Programme (WFP) at the start of this month.

They are not starving. Not yet. But they are already hungry. Children are not dying, but they are being fed only once a day. And instead of meals, meagre though they might have been by Western standards, which in good times might have included a few vegetables – or perhaps once a week an egg, or once a month some meat – they are eating only carbohydrate, and in tiny amounts.

Squatting on her heels outside her round raffia-sided thatched hut Fatima Adam revealed in a matter-of-fact way that she and her three children had not eaten at all that day. The previous day they had eaten only a small amount of injera – a sour pancake bread made from the last of the grain in her store mixed with water. Now her cereal storage pot was empty.

At the door stoop of the next tukul her neighbour Fatima Suleman sat with five of her six children (the eldest had gone to fetch water, an hour's walk away). Her family had eaten that day, but only porridge made from sorghum with nothing to season it, and "no oil or lentils" to add flavour.

The story is the same in the other 800 households dotted around the mountain edges. In Giset the children are not obviously malnourished, but they are thin, and many have the eye and skin ailments that come from an impoverished diet.

At present they are hanging on. One of the people's coping strategies is the extraordinary generosity by which those who have so little share with neighbours who have even less. Another is migration. A good number of the tukuls had padlocks on the door; their inhabitants had moved to the towns, four day's walk away, in search of food. The families who remain are mostly without men. They have, like Fatima Suleman's husband, Sala Ali, gone off to seek work as labourers on the handful of irrigated farms or as waiters in the towns' tea-shops.

"He sends grain back when he can, but he does not always get work," said Fatima. Wages are around 10 nafka a day. It costs 14 nafka to buy arabit of sorghum – up from 6 nafka in August. "That used to last the family two days but now I have to make it last four or five." The World Food Programme on 3 April launched an appeal to the rich nations for $7.9m (£5m) to help feed the 212,000 most vulnerable of the 367,000 people at risk in Eritrea. The response has been zero.

"What we have in Giset is a very tight food situation," said the WFP's director, Catherine Bertini, who visited the village yesterday. "If it continues like this the nutritional status of the people will slowly deteriorate into famine. If we can get food aid to them we can avert a major disaster. I appeal to international donors."

With perverse irony it rained in Giset the day of the UN special envoy's visit. It was the first rain for 16 months and it was too late to save the sorghum crop planted by Fatima Adam's husband, Hammad, on the extensively terraced slopes which show why this area was, until recently, self-sufficient.

In contrast to the famine-hit areas of neighboring Ethiopia, where millions are already at risk from starvation, the farmers here have survived thanks to food supplies from the country’s more fertile highland areas.

But a two-year-old border war between Eritrea and Ethiopia has disrupted farming in the highlands. Local food prices have risen sharply and livestock herds are sold at falling prices.

“It’s a tight food situation. Like most people at risk around the region, these people have coped so far — but they are running out of food and animals,” Bertini told reporters. “They are on the brink of needing aid. If we can get it to them soon we can avert a major disaster,” she added.

A villager, Maka Ismail, wearing a colorful headscarf, told Bertini through an interpreter her husband left three months ago to seek work on the Red Sea coast because their crops had failed. “It is very hard to find food these days,” she said.

"Be off!" another woman shouted at the children. They scattered but only for a moment. Abdi is the fourth child of Muhammad Farah -- who has 10 children, by two wives -- to have died in the last three months here in the hot southeastern corner of Ethiopia, where once again chronic poverty and the worst drought to hit the Horn of Africa in nearly two decades have combined to create hunger, and war has hampered its solution. So too, Ethiopia's leaders argue, lives might have been saved if the outside world had been quicker to help.

But no one is calling it a famine yet. And what has already happened here, everyone hopes, will be as bad as it gets, though there are no guarantees.

In the last few days the world's rich nations have pledged what experts say should be enough food to stave off a far greater disaster: at least eight million Ethiopians face a food shortage, the same number affected in the famine of the mid-1980's that killed hundreds of thousands of people. Six to eight million more in neighboring countries -- Eritrea, Somalia, Sudan, Djibouti, Kenya and Uganda -- also face hunger.

But much could still go wrong. The next rains may fail. Relief food may not arrive on time. The war between Ethiopia and Eritrea may ignite again. And so relief officials are urging a worldwide effort to keep Ethiopia flooded with food, rapidly.

"It could be a big problem," said Catherine Bertini, head of the World Food Program and a United Nations envoy to the Horn of Africa. "We want to make sure it is not a big problem. "This does need to be done very quickly," she added.

Famine announces itself long before arriving, in small pockets that foretell greater disaster and, when local governments and the rest of the world are engaged, with enough time to prevent it. The area around Gode, 750 miles southeast of Addis Ababa, the capital, is where the messengers of widespread hunger made their first call.

It has not rained here in three years, but the problems reached the point of crisis only recently. Local authorities say more than 200 people have died of malnutrition in the last three months around this town, dusty and scattered with the carcasses of hundreds of cows and sheep. Another 500 have died from causes related to hunger, like pneumonia, diarrhea or measles. Almost all the dead are children, the first to fall sick without food.

Abdi Ali is 1 year old, so thin and weak he can barely push out a cry, and what happened to him and his family tells the story of many people here. Like most people in the Ogaden region of Ethiopia, his family members are nomads of Somali origin who depend on cows, goats and camels for food and milk.

Adbi's mother, Hani, a 30-year-old mother of six children, said the family's 200 goats and 60 cattle began to die late last year for lack of water and grazing land. When the last died, in January, the family walked to the town of Denan, about 30 miles north of here.

Now there are 6,000 refugees in Denan, another 15,000 in Gode. Abdi was fine when they arrived, his mother said, but since then he has slowly withered for lack of food. His top front teeth are just coming in, but otherwise, he is not growing but shrinking inside his ever-baggier skin. "When we had cattle, he was drinking milk," she said. "Now we have no cattle, and he has no milk."

While children have been the hardest hit, adults are suffering too. Four days before, Mariama Mose, 35, stopped speaking, and on Saturday she lay with her eyes staring up at the top of their hut in Denan. One of her nine children, a 1-year-old boy, Wali Abdi, died last month. Her husband, Abdi Sheik Hussein, said that she had not eaten for many days, and that he did not know whether she would live either. "Only Allah knows," he said.

Outside the huts, there were the mounds of at least 250 graves, some small for children, most covered with thorn bushes to keep away the hyenas and foxes, as hungry as the people.

There has been much contention between Ethiopia and outside nations about whether its government has done enough to help its starving people. Most of the focus has been on the money spent on Ethiopia's two-year war with its neighbor, Eritrea, which experts say costs roughly $1 million a day. Because of the war, Ethiopia has refused an offer to use the port of Assab in Eritrea, which United Nations officials say would speed up the delivery of food.

But here, the government did deliver food, most of it wheat, in January, February and early March, said Muhammad Ugas, the area manager for a local charity group, the Ogaden Welfare Society, which has headed the relief effort here. But it was not enough, he said, and there were no international groups to help either.

By late February, the crisis had grown and the Ogaden Welfare Society, along with Save the Children, an international charity group, opened up the first feeding center in Gode for the worst cases. By today, 280 children had been treated; 28 of them, or 10 percent, had died. The last one was Abdi Muhammad Farah, who was buried this afternoon in a grave next to his sister's.

Even as Ethiopia has been criticized, its leaders have in return harshly condemned the outside world for not reacting fast enough, particularly after an assessment in December showed that 7.8 million people were facing food shortages. Although the United States responded with large donations of food in January,

Ethiopian officials particularly criticized the European Union for not making a concrete pledge. Karl Harbo, the European Union's delegate in Ethiopia, strongly denied that there had been a delay, saying the Europeans began to buy food from other areas of Ethiopia in February but backed off after the government said there was very little food to buy.

Nonetheless, the European Union finally committed last week to a hard number of 430,000 tons of food by the end of the year -- just as Ms. Bertini began her visit to the region and the world's news media beamed out images of the people around Gode who had begun to starve.

Ms. Bertini and many other Western officials say they believe that the outside world did react promptly -- at least before the severe food shortages moved into actual famine not only here but in the highlands in northern Ethiopia, also suffering from drought. "It's not because there has been a slow response," she said. "It is because there are more people to feed."

By the end of her trip, Ethiopia's prime minister, Meles Zenawi, who had strongly criticized the West, said he too was satisfied. "Now all the indications are that the food aid which will avert disaster may be forthcoming," he said in a news conference last week.

Just as famine follows a more or less predictable cycle, so too does the institutional strategy for overcoming it. Ms. Bertini's trip was meant to spur the outside world to action. Coming as it did when people here began to die, her appeal seems to have brought results: aid groups are coming slowly but in greater numbers.

Still, any comparison to the famine that began in 1984 is premature. Dr. J. W. Lee, the medical representative on Ms. Bertini's trip, noted that most of the deaths in the Gode region were not from hunger specifically. Although the suffering people need food, he said, many are in greater need of medicine, clean water and vaccinations. "The situation is precarious, but its not catastrophic," Dr. Lee said. "A lot of people are talking about this from television images and sound bites, not data."

The fear, though, is that it could get worse. The major worry, officials say, is that the long rains this summer will fail. Moreover, the food pledged so far will feed Ethiopia only through June, World Food Program officials say. With a lag of two to five months between a nation's pledge of food and its delivery -- over terrible roads and through inadequate ports -- the concern is keeping what aid officials call the "food pipeline" full.

While the world appears to have recognized the crisis that threatens the lives of 7.7 million Ethiopians, the job of providing enough food to ward off starvation has barely begun.

Ethiopia says 836,800 tons of emergency food aid are needed to avert a catastrophe. To date, however, it has received only 40,000 tons of the aid, said Amer Dauodi, a logistics officer for the U.N. World Food Program.

But even if donors ante up the required help, they face substantial obstacles in reaching the country's imperiled drought victims.

Landlocked Ethiopia's border war with Eritrea immediately rules out use of the region's best port, Assab on the Red Sea, as a gateway for aid deliveries.

Since the 1984-85 drought in Ethiopia in which up to 1 million people died, the U.N. food agency has spent $20 million to equip Assab to handle large food shipments, said Ramiro Lopez da Silva, head of logistics for the U.N. food agency. Until fighting between the Horn of Africa neighbors broke out in May 1998, the port handled 75 percent of all aid transfers to Ethiopia.

When the extent of the food crisis became evident, Eritrea offered Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi the use of the port for shipment of humanitarian aid. He rejected the help.

Now, Assab sits virtually idle as donors rush to fund road repair and port improvements in Djibouti, a smaller port-state on the Gulf of Aden, to ensure their relief mission succeeds.

The port at Djibouti can currently handle 110,000 tons of goods per month -- considerably below the 170,000 tons in aid and local shipping it must accommodate to cope with Ethiopia's crisis.

To ease congestion at the port, the aid operation needs 1,090 35-ton trucks, da Silva said. That number represents 42 percent of Ethiopia's fleet of such vehicles, so the WFP must lease about 400 trucks from other countries to avoid disrupting normal economic activity in the country, he said.

In addition, 1,400 smaller trucks must be rented from local sources to transfer food from seven distribution hubs in Ethiopia to hungry people.

Not surprisingly, the operation is expensive.

A ton of wheat costs $135. Added to that is another $250 -- the average cost of transporting a ton of grain from the United States or Europe to the Horn of Africa.

Donors have already spent $2.7 million for upgrades on Djibouti's port. Repairing the two main roads from there to Ethiopia will cost another $4 million, da Silva said.

Even if Djibouti's port and roads can be adequately prepared in time, another problem looms: Food must reach millions of endangered villagers in Ethiopia's northern highlands by June, aid agencies say, before the seasonal rains that blanket the region between July and September make many roads impassable.

Da Silva said donors are partly to blame for the current crisis.

After diverting food from Ethiopia's stockpiles for humanitarian operations elsewhere in Africa last year, donors did not replenish the country's reserves, which are at all-time low of 50,000 tons, he said. Also, he said, donors' failure to invest previously in the region's infrastructure will push up the cost of the aid mission.

Hawo, the eldest of a band of mostly women and children, had trekked for days to the nearest village in hopes of aid -- like thousands of other ethnic Somali herders streaming in from the drought-devastated plains of southeastern Ethiopia.

She quickly learned that life was no better in the village, about 20 miles from the region's still minimal relief center of Gode.

''We came because we had no milk for the children. But they say they have no food here,'' Hawo said. Village elder Mahamed Mahamud Gure could only record the numbers of the latest newcomers in a faded notebook, the same notebook in which he records their names when they die -- as 389 did in the last two months, according to his figures.

When the aid groups come, if the aid groups come, he wants to be able to show them.

''We are in very great want and difficulty. If anyone asks me, I want to be able to inform them,'' Gure said. ''I want them to know.''

The land has grown so hard that the people sometimes give up on digging proper graves and have resorted to shoving corpses into holes dug in termite mounds, he said. ''Twenty-five are in there,'' he said, pointing at one with his cane.

The drought threatens millions more people across the Horn of Africa, according to the U.N. World Food Program. An estimated 150,000 are in danger in Djibouti and 350,000 in Eritrea. As many as 425,000 people in Somalia would need food shipments if April rains fail, and 2.7 million in northern Kenya are hungry and urgently need donations, the WFP says.

Like the 7.7 million estimated in danger in Ethiopia, many of the first- and hardest-hit in those nations are nomadic herders.

Three years of sparse rains have killed virtually all the cattle on which Ethiopia's ethnic Somali herders draw meat, milk and life. Lush years immediately before the drought tempted many to trade their traditional camels for cattle, less hardy but more productive.

Modern borders and development have constricted migrations that used to range as far as northeast Uganda to a 60-mile-by-60-mile patch of land. That limits foraging in bad years.

Wracked by war and ongoing rebel conflicts, distrusted by the government in Addis Ababa, 620 miles and two days' drive away on miserable roads, the region and its people have little power to press for improvements that would help curb the accelerating cycles of famine.

The foreign community encouraged creation of emergency food reserves after up to 1 million people died in Ethiopia's 1984-85 famine. But gaps in donations of food or money into the relief pipeline mean aid to the nomads has slowed to a trickle in recent months.

Assistance threatens to stop entirely in June, aid agencies warned last month. That set off an international alarm, but so far it seems to have drawn far more journalists than aid workers.

The herders can't wait months; thousands gathering in Hadawe, Denan and other communities in Ethiopia's southeastern Somali region seem unlikely to make it weeks or even days.

''This child is going to die,'' said Bisharo Sheek Abdi -- speaking of her own child. The 4-year-old girl, a bundle of bones topped with the yellow hair of malnutrition, still was avidly alive enough to drink thirstily of the water that is all her mother has to give her. ''Or maybe she will live.''

The girl would be the last of her parents' four children to die. The family shelters under the hides of two of the 40 cows they used to own -- now all dead. The cloth and plastic bags hanging on the walls of the hut hold only more bags, no food.

Hadawe, which looks from the road like just a cluster of huts on the way to the growing refugee camp of Denan, has had no aid distributions for 26 days, Mahamed, the village elder, said Saturday. And the aid the herders are getting is not the aid they most need, said Ahmed Ibrahim Hussein of the Ogaden Welfare Society, a local group helping the drought-displaced.

As livestock raisers, the herders want milk. Their children must have it, Hussein said. Two-thirds of the up to 18 people being buried two to a grave each day at the Denan camp are children.

At Hadawe, Sunday afternoon finds Bisharo's 4-year-old girl dead, her body lying within a shroud in the shade of a hut. Village men hack out a grave -- a proper one -- in the heat of the sun.

It's the 27th day with no aid, Mahemed notes.

In the distance, where dust devils twirl on the horizon, herder Mahamed Olad points to indiscernible specks that he says are his cattle.

The grain is destined for Ethiopia, where aid agencies warn that 8m people are at risk of famine. But to Ali Hettam, the stevedore in charge of the 2,500-tonne, 24-hour a day, unloading operation, it is an excellent commercial opportunity.

His company, Comad, is paid around $12.50 a tonne to unload, bag and shift grain onto lorries. Over the next eight months, his prospects are encouraging - the World Food Programme (WFP) is looking to ship 170,000 tonnes of food a month, of which the lion's share will go through Djibouti port. If, as he claims, Mr Hettam has 65 per cent of the market, he could be looking at monthly turnover of around $1m - a healthy sum, even after costs. "Business is very good," he confides.

He is one of the winners not only from a big food operation, but also the vicissitudes of war politics. The Ethiopian government has refused to accept Eritrea's offer to bring aid supplies through the port of Assab, which can handle 2m tonnes of cargo a year and, before the neighbours' two-year border war, used to serve around 80 per cent of Ethiopia's needs. The United Nations - despite clear indications it would prefer to use Assab's donor-improved facilities - has agreed to focus on the alternatives.

The WFP estimates that 170,000 tonnes of food a month will be needed to avert disaster in Ethiopia. At present, Djibouti is capable of handling 100-110,000 tonnes in its deep-sea berths, while the Somaliland port of Berbera (being developed by the EU) can take around 25,000 tonnes. That leaves a shortfall of 35,000-45,000 tonnes a month. To fill that, the WFP has embarked on a $2.7m port improvement project. It is levelling two warehouses to make more room for unloading, and building a new one. It will install a new "virtual berth": an empty vessel docked alongside an oil jetty, where the grain from carriers will be bagged before it is loaded onto trucks on dry land.

In order to keep the supplies flowing south, the WFP plans to bring in 400 lorries from abroad, adding to its own fleet of up to 550 in Ethiopia. The organisation will also spend several million dollars on rehabilitating roads to the west and to the south, and will use the decrepit Djibouti-Ethiopia railway. It will be a tight operation, with little room for error. It is also big business.

On average, delivering food from its point of origin to a hungry Ethiopian costs $250 per tonne. Multiply that by an expected 1.35m tonnes of food over the next eight months, and that makes almost $340m dollars in transport alone.

The WFP feels the cost and logistical difficulties are an acceptable price for fulfilling its overriding mandate: getting supplies through, where needed, as fast as possible.

But the operation does raise certain questions. By developing Ethiopia's alternative supply route, one could argue that the UN has become an agent of Addis Ababa's aim of isolating Eritrea. One impetus to end the war - Ethiopia's difficulty in finding an alternative port - may have lessened.

Trevor Rowe of the WFP is quick to dismiss such speculation. The impact of the programme will be small, he says, and will in no way prop up the Addis government. Others suggest it may even have the opposite effect: one of Ethiopia's main aims in the war has been to capture Assab, they say. Now it may not need to.