World Food Program (WFP) chief James Morris said on Saturday that international donors must act to avert a catastrophe in Kenya, where some 3.5 million people face starvation due to a devastating drought.
Morris spoke as he toured northern Kenya, where at least 40 people have died amid food shortages which are threatening at least 11 million people across the Horn of Africa.
"This is as bad as it gets. The consequences are absolutely catastrophic, there is just no alternative if lives are going to be saved, the world has to provide food," Morris said in El Wak, a dusty outpost about 820km northeast of Nairobi on the Somali border.
The WFP chief pledged to mobilize funds and deliver food in the region in the coming week.
"Thank God, there is enough food to keep people alive. We have what we need to do our work through April, but we will urgently need more help in the next 10 days because it takes time to buy, ship and distribute food. It is not something you can do overnight," he said.
"You don't have to be very experienced or sophisticated to see how intense and difficult and overwhelming the risk is. This is serious, there is no time to waste," he said.
Charity group Oxfam last month warned that donors' responses had been dwarfed by the immediate needs of the people.
The WFP warned that it had enough cereals to last until next month, but will run out of the less important vegetable oil and pulses by the end of the month.
"If we don't get any more food aid it will be a catastrophe ... We are already on the edge because food is running out and we are supposed to be feeding people until February next year," WFP spokesman Peter Smerdon said.
"If we get a break in the food pipeline then malnutrition will go up very seriously," he said.
He said the UN agency had a funding shortfall of US$197 million in its food aid program for Kenya, a nation of about 32 million people.
Of the US$225 million needed until next February to buy some 396,525 tonnes of food each month, the agency had received US$28 million.
The UN's special humanitarian envoy to the Horn of Africa, Kjell Bondevik, bluntly said last month that foreign donors must act or people will die.
El Wak resident Mohamed Ibrahim, 55, said 160 of his 200 camels had died and his herd of 100 cattle had been almost completely wiped out, with only three surviving.
"We don't just need food, we need other kinds of help as well," Ibrahim said. "People say we should change the way we live but there are no towns, no businesses, no agriculture that we can do. And so we use our animals as banks."
Ibrahim Younis, emergency coordinator at a feeding center in El Wak run by the Belgian branch of Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders), said children were a barometer of the worsening drought.
"The situation is getting worse because we are seeing an increase in the numbers of children coming to us," he said.
"The key problem is water because these children are malnourished and a lack of hygiene means they get diarrhea, which pushes them over the edge," he said.
In addition to Kenya, the UN estimates that up to 11 million people in three other east African countries -- Ethiopia, Somalia and Djibouti -- are on the brink of starvation.
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