"See, these are my bees," he announces in a whisper. "I am a beekeeper."

Like the three million subsistence farmers in Ethiopia's highlands, Mr. Asfaw suffered a crop failure last year and has almost no food left in his mud-and-stone home.

But, unlike most people here, he has found an innovative way to generate a little extra income. The honey he gets from his modern beehive has already netted him $18 in the marketplace --more than 15 times what the average labourer earns in a day.

In the future, these bees might just put food on his family's tin plates.

Certainly, his fields are not enough to feed his three children. Mr. Asfaw has tilled and toiled and tried to grow food on his little plot of land but, in the past 10 years, just three have yielded a good harvest. Even then, the food only lasts his family for seven months. The rains Mr. Asfaw depends on to grow peas and grains are simply too erratic. One year, there is a drought. The next, torrential floods and hail.

Today, the gravel road that winds through the northern highlands in the regional state of Wollo leads past one rocky field after the other. The vast tracts of lifeless brown land are interrupted by a few patches of green -- the spots where some lucky farmers have managed to exploit a spring for irrigation.

But there is no natural source of water near Mr. Asfaw's plot. He will need months of solid rainfall to grow his millet. He has already turned the soil and planted some seeds. "But only God knows if the rains will come," he said.

The good thing about bees is that God is not required for success. That is why Save the Children Canada has helped dozens of impoverished farmers to diversify their agricultural operations with honey-making beehives.

"People in the highlands definitely need food aid -- and fast," said John Graham, a program director in Ethiopia for Save the Children Canada. "But, for a long time, we have worked to develop support projects that decrease people's vulnerability to disaster."

Schemes that provide impoverished highland dwellers with an alternative source of income are one small step. Farmers like Mr. Asfaw are often so reliant on their fields they have almost no cash to buy basic essentials, let alone invest in new tools or land improvements.

Save the Children gave Mr. Asfaw a loan of $16 so he could buy his wood-plank hive and a bee colony. His first harvest of honey not only sweetened meals for his children -- "They love the taste" -- it earned him enough in the market to pay back his loan and still have a $2 profit.

"That is good money," he said. Enough to buy his children their first clothes from a store.

He will still need food aid to survive, especially if the long rains due in June fail, once again, to fall on his patch of soil. But Mr. Asfaw is already starting to plan.

"I'm going to get another beehive," he said.

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Ethiopia says the high-profile humanitarian operation has "the sole aim of putting pressure on us to stop the war" with Eritrea, in the words of government spokesman Haile Kiros Guessesse.

However some donor countries fear that this aid, far from promoting peace, might fuel the war, which is currently stalled.

Germany struck a cautionary note last week by questioning whether UN funds should be spent to help to feed Ethiopia's poor when it was spending meagre resources on its border war with Eritrea.

Ethiopia responded by recalling its ambassasor to Berlin home for consultations, and Germany's ambassador to Ethiopia was summoned to the foreign ministry.

It is feared that infrastructural improvements aimed at speeding up aid delivery will also oil Ethiopia's war machine.

The UN World Food Programme (WFP) is to modernise the port of Djibouti and repair part of the road that leads to Ethiopia, but this route is also the main conduit for Ethiopia's imported war material.

The US proposal to use the Eritrean port of Assab to transport food aid to Ethiopia had the same aim: to force the Ethiopians and the Eritreans to cooperate for humanitarian reasons and thereby engage in direct dialogue.

When WFP director Catherine Bertini was visiting Djibouti earlier this month, the cargo ship Vale, recently arrived from Rouen in France, was unloading 30,000 tonnes of wheat for the WFP, while 200 metres (yards) away, a Bulgarian vessel was delivering its cargo of ammunition.

But she refused to be drawn on the question, saying her concern was to save children's lives.

For the donor community, food aid is a path to peace.

Diplomats in the region say that US and UN humanitarian efforts in the region presuppose that if Ethiopia is the beneficiary of massive international aid, it won't dare recommence hostilities in the stalled war with Eritrea.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan on Tuesday urged donor countries to dismiss concerns about the war which had led some countries to hold back donations.

"We cannot punish children for what the leaders of these countries have done," Annan said in Paris after a meeting with Bertini.

Fears that the two-year-old war might restart were raised at the end of March when a meeting between the warring neighbours under the auspices of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) in Algiers was postponed.

Addis Ababa has refused to link the humanitarian question to the conflict with Asmara.

Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, who accuses Eritrea of having invaded his country in May 1998, reaffirmed the right of a poor country to defend its sovereignty even in the face of famine.

If negotiations fail, Meles asserted that Ethiopia would not hesitate to return to war.

According to UN agencies, Ethiopia will receive at least a million tonnes of food aid this year to feed up to eight million people threatened by famine.

The Council was informed that the OAU had established an early starting date for proximity talks between the two parties, to be held in Algiers as early as 29 April, according to a statement to the press read by Council President, Ambassador Robert Fowler of Canada, which holds the rotating presidency for April.

The members of the Council noted prior commitments made by both parties to attend early talks under the OAU's direction, and urged the governments of Ethiopia and Eritrea to participate with a renewed commitment to peace, Ambassador Fowler said.