"The conditions are grim," said Hugh Parmer, assistant administrator for humanitarian affairs with the U.S. Agency for International Development.

The United States and other Western nations have defended themselves against accusations made by non governmental organizations that they were slow to react promptly to early warnings of disaster in Ethiopia.

Parmer, who recently completed a two-week trip of the affected region, said the estimated value of U.S. aid to Ethiopia this year would total $184 million.

"There is not going to be a 1984 crisis again in which one million people died," Parmer said, referring to the deadly famine in 1984 in Ethiopia that captured the world's attention with images of dying and malnourished children.

Parmer said the United States knew late last year that Ethiopian grain reserves were low. But it took time to react because "we did not have the ability to know that rains would fail there."

Rains generally arrive in the Horn of Africa between February and April. But this year, they have not, meaning the harvest expected in June is likely to fail.

The USAID estimates that more than 8.3 million people are at risk in Ethiopia and a total of 16.5 million people are at risk in the greater Horn of Africa region, which comprises Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi.

The drought problem in Ethiopia is compounded by a war over its 600-mile (1,000-km) border with Eritrea that has killed tens of thousands of soldiers during the past two years.

"There is no doubt that if there were no problems between Ethiopia and Eritrea, it would be a lot easier to respond to this crisis," said Gayle Smith, senior director for African Affairs with the National Security Council.

Parmer said he was not worried about U.S. aid and relief efforts being used to fund Ethiopia's war.

"I do not see distribution by the government as a major problem," Parmer said. "We will not just deliver through the government. We will also distribute food and supplies through the nongovernmental organizations like the Red Cross."

The Live Aid concert and its predecessor, Band Aid, raised $110 million and inspired a genre of marathon celebrity charity efforts like USA for Africa and Farm Aid. Band Aid's "Do They Know It's Christmas?'' became the fastest-selling single on record.

In 2000, Ethiopia's starving are back on the world's TVs. The familiar images of stick-thin kids with doomed eyes raise frustrating questions: Again? Didn't all that effort help at all?

The answers, in short: Yes. And yes, it did, actually.

"There is a potential to avert it this time. And that's really significant. Clearly that's much, much better than chasing the game,'' said Charles Walker of British-based Oxfam, one of the charities that worked closely with Live Aid.

Last time, under a then-military Ethiopian government accused of using supply blockades as one its deadliest weapons, hundreds of thousands are believed to have starved to death by the time the world acted.

Despite the intensity of the public response, an estimated 1 million people died. This time, the outcry is in part a pre-emptive one. The U.N. World Food Program this month is issuing urgent warnings of massive food shortages across the Horn of Africa if donors don't come through immediately.

The warning comes with the death toll still in the hundreds or low thousands among the hardest-hit ethnic Somali herders of Ethiopia's southeast -- although with aid on the ground still minimal, the famine claims more victims daily, and is spreading, Ethiopia warned Friday.

One key difference between 1985 and 2000: A 355,000-metric-ton strategic food reserve, a famine early warning system and a famine response plan, all put in place or refined since the 1983-85 disaster.

The measures are "very much an outgrowth of the 1980s, as a way to keep a handle on the situation in Ethiopia,'' Walker said.

Unfortunately, any self-congratulations by Ethiopia or international donors can pretty much stop there.

While the emergency reserves helped sustain millions through the first of what are now three years of drought, international donors' tardiness on pledges meant the reserves were down to just 50,000 metric tons by the time the WFP warnings went out this month.

"If the international community committed itself to supporting food security and then failed, then that is a very disturbing matter,'' said Simon Maxwell of the British-based Overseas Development Institute.

Aid agencies say the European Union in particular had fulfilled only half its pledges. The EU, which defends its efforts, in turn blames Ethiopia for failing to end its 23-month-old border war with Eritrea.

At the least, the border war complicates aid delivery. It's also widely seen as diverting Ethiopia's own resources away from the famine and risking donors' suspicions that any aid might benefit fighters more than the starving.

Ethiopia and Eritrea, ranked among the world's 10 poorest countries, each spend an estimated $1 million a day on defense, the British-based International Institute for Strategic Studies says.

On Wednesday, the World Food Program's chief urged international leaders to push harder for an end to the region's conflicts.

"There is only one long-term (solution) -- that is peace,'' Catherine Bertini told reporters after a weeklong tour of Horn of Africa nations, the area of the looming famine. In fact, peace would be just a start. Maxwell estimates that Ethiopia, with sub-Saharan Africa's second-largest population, needs 50 years of economic development to break the cycle of famine.

Currently, Ethiopia depends entirely on rain-fed agriculture -- a losing prospect in a region where rainfall patterns are changing. Government administration and services are weak in the hardest-hit area; none of the strategic reserve warehouses are even near it.

In 1985, what was the world's first TV famine evoked the compassion of everyone from the now-forgotten Sade to the now-immortalized Princess Diana, who with Prince Charles kicked off the Live Aid concert at Wembley Stadium.

In 2000, world will to provide long-term development aid -- or even short-term relief -- may be lagging.

Geldof, knighted and nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize after Live Aid, did not respond to requests for comment this week from The Associated Press. Intermediaries indicated he was busy with a new album and tired of being misquoted as a famine spokesman.

Geldof told the BBC earlier this month of a "repugnance'' at the return of mass starvation to Ethiopia.

No one is charging that the war against neighboring Eritrea is causing the food shortage. The prime culprit is three years of poor rains in a nation that cannot feed itself in the best of times.

But there is little question, experts say, that war has diverted attention and resources, complicating the solutions and providing a point of soreness that has distracted both Ethiopian officials and rich outside nations that would help alleviate the hunger.

It also prompts difficult questions. What are the obligations of outside nations to help, if Ethiopia is spending its own money fighting Eritrea? Do outside nations actually keep the conflict going, by agreeing to feed the hungry as Ethiopia continues to fight? Or is any link between food and politics merely self-righteousness from rich outsiders, when Ethiopia has made at least an effort to feed its people and has worked hard to prevent famine in the first place?

For the moment, the West has put these questions on hold, deciding on unconditional help to head off what could become the worst famine here since hundreds of thousands died in the mid-1980's. In the last two months, at least 200 people have died of hunger in the arid southeast of Ethiopia.

"It is a general consensus that humanitarian assistance should not be affected by conflicts," said Karl Harbo, the European Union's delegate to Ethiopia.

Another Western diplomat said: "We have problems with the Ethio-Eritrean issue. But that's not going to affect our helping hungry people."

To many outsiders -- and some of those affected by the drought -- the issue is simple: Any nation with so many hungry people cannot afford to fight. "They should not be spending so much money on the war when people are hungry," said Abdi Rahman, an unemployed man in the southeastern town of Gode, where the food shortages have been the worst.

In particular, some say, they cannot afford to fight a war like this one. The war between Ethiopia and Eritrea -- quiet now but fought in fierce bursts since May 1998 -- can be summed up as a large number of dead over relatively small outright stakes. Experts estimate that a minimum of 20,000 soldiers have been killed, and perhaps double that number or more.

"This is the largest war on the planet, bar none," said one Western diplomat in Addis Ababa, the capital.

The overt reason for the war is a strip of land with no particular value along the border of the two nations, which split amicably in 1991 after rebels from both Ethiopia and what was then the Eritrean region of Ethiopia defeated the regime of Mengistu Haile Mariam. Both sides claim the region as their own.

Behind the border dispute is a boiling pot of unsettled issues, including personality clashes between the leaders of the two nations, economic tensions and the fact that many in Ethiopia never wanted Eritrea on its own (partly because Ethiopia is landlocked without it, a difficulty now as aid groups contemplate how to get food in).

To the prime minister of Ethiopia, Meles Zenawi, considered by many to be one of the brightest leaders in Africa, the war is completely separate from the drought.

He has repeatedly said that Eritrea invaded Ethiopian territory and contends that this war is an issue of national sovereignty.

"The view of Ethiopians is that you do not wait until you have a full tummy to protect your sovereignty," he told reporters in Addis Ababa this month. "We do not believe that sovereignty is a luxury for the rich."

The nation's defenders point out that Ethiopia has made great strides in recent years to reform agriculture, increasing harvests substantially. It has also put in place an early warning system against famine and established an emergency food reserve, which had reached more than 315,000 tons of grain last year. Since then, as Mr. Meles notes, the reserve has dwindled to about 50,000 tons as food programs operated in the country by the United Nations, the United States and the European Union borrowed from it last year -- and have not yet paid it back.

Moreover, the government bought some 100,000 tons of grain in the first three months of this year to head off famine -- a decided change from the Mengistu regime, which had used famine as a weapon, burning crops and blocking relief supplies in the mid-1980's.

Still, there is no doubt that Ethiopia is spending a mammoth amount on the war. One diplomat estimates that salaries alone for 350,000 soldiers cost between $14 million and $20 million a month. That does not count perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars spent on ammunition and arms, including Russian tanks, at least eight fighter planes and an unknown number of support aircraft purchased only this year.

"The war with Eritrea is taking away their attention, and to a certain extent, taking away resources," said Tim Waites, regional food security coordinator for the Horn of Africa for Oxfam, the international charity group.

And the war has created other problems. Ethiopia will not allow relief supplies to enter through Eritrea's two ports, Massawa and Assab, though the United Nations would like it. Ethiopia says it fears that Eritrea will seize shipments, as it did in 1998, when it confiscated some 70,000 tons of goods bound for Ethiopia, including 45,000 tons of grain.

Also, with so much military might on the front, Ethiopia has not spared many soldiers to help make the Ogaden region, around Gode, safe from bandits and rebels fighting the government. The United Nations considers the region so unsafe that foreign staff is not permitted to spend the night.

Moreover, the entire aid operation will become complicated -- if not impossible -- if the fighting erupts again.

Few outside politicians and aid officials have been willing to speak out publicly about the link between the war and the food shortage. An exception is Claire Short, the British minister responsible for overseas development, who said recently, "I do not believe that anyone in the U.K. believes we should be providing long-term assistance to a country which is increasing its spending on arms, year on year."

[On Saturday, Ethiopia recalled its ambassador in Berlin to Addis Ababa for consultations after the African affairs director of Germany's Foreign Ministry, Helga van Strachwitz, criticized Ethiopia's military spending during a time of drought, Agence France-Presse reported. Germany has also called for a United Nations Security Council meeting to discuss the drought in relation to the war, the news agency quoted Ethiopian news media as saying.]

Last year, the Europeans, in fact, suspended much of their aid for long-term development because of the war. The United States has not, although American officials say they have been working hard behind the scenes to reach a settlement.

But many observers say much of the talk of ending the war has evaporated with the food shortage -- in part because outside nations do not want to be blamed for any problems that hamper the relief operation. Some aid groups and others say a vital opportunity is being missed.

The choice, some experts say, is not to threaten to pull out if Ethiopia does not make a much stronger effort to end the war. Rather, they say, the outside world should be clear that it is helping feed the hungry as a way to end the war, at the same time offering a peace package that would include more money for long-term development and relief from Ethiopia's crippling foreign debt.

That is not happening, said one Western researcher in Addis Ababa.

"There is no pretense of, 'We're negotiating over your peace and we're going to call in these debts,' " the researcher said. "Part of it is, that is too complicated. Part of it is that it isn't a priority. It's kind of a nuisance conflict."