Beshi Shekuira, 14, leaned back onto a wall of a storehouse in Ropi, a small town in west Arsi Zone of the Oromia Regional State. The shade of the house, which also serves as stabilization centre, helped her protect the baby girl - who was half asleep in her arms - from the scorching sun. To a casual observer, Beshi looked like an older sister to the child. She is, in fact, her mother.

A victim of an early marriage, Beshi, a seventh grader, was forced to get married last year. The marriage did not last long; she left her husband four months later. What her husband brought home was not enough to feed the two of them; she decided to return to her parent's home. She went back to school and things seemed going smoothly until she discovered that she was pregnant.

Life would not be easy for her she realised; after all, she was bringing a child into a family of 12.

"My mother has five children and my stepmother four," Beshi said.

Nonetheless, her worst nightmare happened a few months ago due to an extended dry season. Drought struck Basa Batu, her village.

"Everyone is weak from hunger," Beshi said of members of the family she had left behind when she brought her daughter to the center, in Siraro Wereda. It is one of the three hotspot drought areas in the Oromia region, according to the Emergency Nutrition Coordination Unit [ENCU] of the Disaster Prevention and Preparedness Agency [DPPA]. On the larger scale, the deteriorating humanitarian situation in the regional state is deeply worrying aid agencies.

"High levels of malnutrition and increased admissions of severely malnourished children to treatment centers have been reported in lowland and highland woredas of the region," disclosed the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), on its monthly bulletin, Focus on Ethiopia.

Another report by the same organization revealed that approximately 2,000 cases of severely acute malnutrition (SAM) were reported in Siraro by mid-May 2008. Beshi's daughter, Shurube Guta, is one of those who has been affected by the drought.

"She has not had proper food in a while," Beshi told Fortune about her daughter's previous condition. "I decided to bring her here [Ropi] when I saw that she was on the verge of death."

Ropi is a small town without electricity. There is not even a single hotel, so there are only two things that attract visitors' attention. The first is a new building owned by the Ethiopian Telecommunications Corporation (ETC) on which microwave receivers are installed, and the other is a big compound run by Missionaries of Charity. Lately, gray tents have been added to the landscape, and these are crowded with mothers and children, and put on the field behind the nuns' residential area.  

Medical doctors from Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) of Greece were busy checking the many children brought from surrounding kebelles to the centre, desperately in need of emergency help. Within two weeks of its opening on May 13, 2008, 317 children were admitted to the "stabilization center". Children with little hope of survival are brought to the center by their parents or close associates and regain weight.

The scene is, however, tragic: Distressing images of children fill the Ropi Center. In a corner, a woman pushes a syringe full of therapeutic milk into a thin plastic tube through her grandson's nostrils. On the other side, a mother tries to feed a plumpy nut to her fragile baby. A few metres from her, a baby boy, whose butt is covered with white plasters, struggles to crawl, albeit at a snail's pace, on hands and legs.

In the middle of the dusty field, another child resting in the cradle of his mother's arms struggles to eat a biscuit. A mother seems mesmerized by how visible the ribs on her daughter's chest are when she uncovers the cloth from where she lies inside a tent, a feeding syringe in a cup next to her side. 

All these are malnourished children who have passed through one or all of the three phases of a therapeutic food treatment that are provided by the center. At the initial stage of the treatment, children are given therapeutic milk - which nutritionists named F75 - and medication, eight times a day. The milk is prepared from dry skimmed powder and various vitamins which are believed to have high nutritional value.

In the second phase, therapeutic milk - F100 - helps children to regain weight by de-worming and with the assistance of other essential drugs. When the children get better, they are transferred to the outpatient program and told to come every week for additional medication and for plumpy nuts.

A week ago, Shurube passed through the first two treatments. Yet, and contrary to what her mother now believes, she is in a battle for survival. Her mouth froze when opened and her eyes stare vacantly into the air.

"She has a 50-50 possibility of surviving," Emiliano Lucero (MD), from MSF, said.

He is one of the three doctors and four nurses treating the influx of affected children. Shurube has been in the center for two weeks. Many are not that lucky; they die in their villages before making it there, according to accounts of many mothers. MSF doctors said out of the children admitted so far, 12 had died by the end of May.

Sadly, there appears to be a flawed information flow when the depth of the problem was communicated up the hierarchical ladder; either that, or more depressing, the government must be in a state of denial.  

"I did not receive any information that indicated the death of children from hunger," Addisu Legesse, deputy prime minister, who is also minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, told members of Parliament on Tuesday, June 3. "But when such problems happen, children can die from previous medical problems."

Die they do in numbers, according to Woyio Dalecha, a resident of Bilancha village in Sirarao. Other stabilization centers have also registered a number of deaths. Located inside Bisdimo Hospital and Weter health centers in East Hararghe Zone of the Oromia region, they have reported the death of eight children. A tour the different locations in East Hararghe and West Arsi zones of the region exposes one to horrible stories of children dying in small and remote villages. Those asked about the number of children who had died in their locality, rushed to call their parents without responding.

Woyio called out name after name of those he said had died recently. In a struggle to recollect the number of people that had died in his village, he paused for a moment.

"Approximately 38 people, mostly children, have died in our village due to a shortage of food," he said.  

His is a claim supported by UN's situation report, Drought in Ethiopia. So far, 55 deaths have been reported in Siraro alone, said the report released last week. It warns that many more are confronted with the grim prospect of death from hunger.

Bontu Ousman, a one-year old baby girl, could be one of these.

Among the 29,735 malnourished children in East Hararghe Zone of the Oromia Regional State, she tries to close her eyes to nap in her grandmother's caring hold in Weter Health Center. Her surroundings, however, are far from encouraging sleep. There was too much noise inside the male and female wards of the health center, fully used to keep affected children.

Mothers were lying on mattresses. Some of the children held their mother's breasts, while others tried awkwardly to play. A few cried to get attention. Bontu was quiet and seemed breathless; she needed to be touched to check her condition. When she cried, her face revealed great pain as a result of the contact. Like many of the children there, she came to the center to get treatment for her severe malnourishment. But her situation was the worst of a total of 68 that had been admitted to the center. She weighed around 3.8Kg; and her wrist was the size of an adult's thumb.

It is in cases like this one that local authorities restricted journalists from taking photographs or filming.

"Her mother died," said Bontu's grandmother. "She has not been breast fed."

Nonetheless, her condition was improving from since she arrived at the center from her village of Gende Issa, in Weter area, Kersa Wereda.

Kersa is one of the 18 drought prone woredas in East Hararghe. Its community has been beneficiary to an Enhanced Outreach Strategy (EOS) program launched in 2004. It is jointly run by the Ministry of Health, the Disaster Prevention and Preparedness Agency (DPPA), in collaboration with the United Nations agencies of UNICEF and WFP.

Close to 325 woredas are covered on a national level.

The outreach programs are designed to support 5.8 million targeted children under five years of age and 1.6 million pregnant and lactating women with supplementary feeding. There is a screening conducted twice a year to determine the status of children and mothers: If any are found to be malnourished, they become eligible for what operators on the ground call "Targeted Supplementary Feeding Program (TSFP)". 

Through the program, these organizations provide Vitamin A, de-worming and iodine for children and distribute mosquito nets in malaria risk areas. It has brought tremendous results for child-survival as Ethiopia has managed to reduce under-five mortality rate by 40pc between 1990 and 2006, according to the UNICEF.

This good news was short-lived for people in some woredas of East Hararghe; the program has been terminated since last November. Despite existing mechanisms to prevent child death due to hunger and the capacity to respond to malnourishment, inadequate resources have become sources of problems to the current crisis. WFP was compelled to cut the volume of its assistance in recent weeks due to the inability to meet demand, while UNICEF sent out a desperate appeal for additional aid.   

Beginning in November 2007, WFP stopped feeding children and their mothers found, through screening, to be in need of supplementary feeding. For instance, WFP cut 12 woredas in East Hararghe Zone out from their support scheme due to inadequate resources, according to Aliye Youya, deputy head of East Hararghe Health Office.

WFP itself recently announced that out of 105 beneficiary woredas in Oromia region, only 28 of them would remain covered by the program. It needs 147 million dollars to fill the 183,000tns of total relief shortfall; for its TSF program, an additional 28,000tns are required. For an organization that is struggling to fill the funding gap of 700 million dollars worldwide, the current challenge is enormous.

UNICEF has also experienced similar constraints and appealed for 50 million dollars, an amount that increased by 30 million dollars in only two weeks. The Children's Fund warned that "if the situation continues to deteriorate, the figure could grow."

WFP too warned that failure to meet the appeal made to the international community, it might cut "the rations for those who rely on the world to stand by them during times of abject need".

The cuts that WFP was forced to make already have disastrous effects that pushed Bontu and other children to fall into the malnourishment trap in Oromia region.

Oromoia is not alone in this, though. The drought and lack of sufficient emergency response deteriorated the humanitarian situation in Southern and Somali regional states. The Amhara and Tigray regional states are also seen as emerging hotspots.

After so much juggling between the government and donors, Ethiopian authorities have announced on Tuesday that 4.5 million people are directly affected by the drought and need emergency food nationwide. The number exceeds by 2.3 million people from previous estimates made by the government.

DPPA, a federal agency under restructuring, had identified 2.18 million people in need of relief food assistance between the period of April and June 2008, when it released its 2008 Humanitarian Relief Requirement. However, humanitarian organizations, including WFP, believed that the number was underestimated and put their own figure of 3.4 million people, while UNICEF reported an estimated 126,000 children had reached a critical stage of severe malnutrition.

"Our assumption earlier was that Belg rains would be normal," Simon Michale, director general of DPPA, told a joint press conference he called last week, together with the Minister of Health, as well as representatives of the UNICEF and WFP. "But due to global climate change, there was poor Belg rainfall. The scarcity of rainfall in the Southern region has also resulted in the failure in the production of root crops. These factors caused critical food insecurity."

Has this "food insecurity" reached the level of famine? It is a question many, both in the government and the international humanitarian circle, are not comfortable to answer.

"This is not famine," said Bjorn Ljungqvist, country representative of the UNICEF.

What constitutes and defines famine is subject of an endless debate within the humanitarian world. There are others, however, who believe famine is around the corner in Ethiopia. But it is nowhere close to the 1980s' famine, according to an expert working for an international aid agency. It is not even similar to that of 2003. He sees a crisis developing in pocket areas of the country through lack of government timely and sufficient response when the alarming reports started to emerge as early as January 2008.

But many agree that it the worst since the major humanitarian crisis of 2003, where 13.2 million people were affected.

"The immediate impact of the situation upon health and livelihoods are evident in the growing numbers of people suffering from malnutrition, morbidity of livestock and use of extreme coping mechanisms by communities in Southern, Somali, Oromia and Amhara regions," OCHA's situation report disclosed.

Authorities at the Federal Level have been complacent; they think the problem as reported by these parties are "exaggerated" and feels that it is now "under control".

Simon, the director general of DPPA, told the media that the situation is "under control." However, he gave contradictory figures when it came to relief requirements. The numbers he mentioned on Tuesday at the press conference varied from 300,000tns to 380,000tns. He then admitted that there was a 208,000tns food aid gap that should be filled should the government succeed in its claim of putting "the situation under control".

Others were busy in their attempt to disprove the number of children reported by international organization and media as being affected by the drought.

Tewodros Adhanom (PhD), minister of Health, told the media at Tuesday's joint press conference that the numbers as reported by the media were "exaggerated."

"From 840,000 children under five years of age we screened, 36,000 suffer severe and acute malnutrition," Tewodros said. "We made a projection that there are 75,000 severely malnourished children directly affected due to the current drought."

UNICEF, however, says six million children under five, and living in drought prone districts, require urgent and continued preventive health and nutrition interventions.

In most areas, people could not get enough rain for the past seven consecutive months. The failure of rain not only has limited the plantation of crops but also resulted in the loss of significant number of livestock.

Kimia Abdulkader, a resident of Eda village of Kersa Wereda in East Hararghe, has gone through all of these experiences.

Frost damaged her family's harvest. Due to lack of rain, they could not grow anything now. Dwindling pasture led to the death of her cattle. When she went to the market to buy sorghum, the price escalated from two Birr to six Birr per kilogram. Rice was four Birr per kilo very recently, Kimia recalled. It has now skyrocketed to 12 Br. This is also the case at the international level: the average world price for rice has risen by 217pc since 2006. In Ethiopia, a year-on-year average increase on food prices was 39.1pc.

"To buy some food, we go to Aweday and work as daily labourers," she said. "We get five to 10 Birr per day."

Kimia and her husband are now able to feed their four children and themselves. Luckily, none of their children show signs of malnourishment, although Kimia started to observe they began to lose weight. It could be a matter of time before they start to visit one of the feeding centers in their area.

"My husband is a farmer," she said. "But we do not have any seed for farming or enough pasture for our cattle. We are afraid we may be left behind in our village." 

BY TESFALEM WALDYES
SPECIAL TO FORTUNE
Michael Chebud, Fortune Staff Writer, has contributed to this story.