They came in search of food and water

A toe sticks out from the small, soft bundle lying inside a hut of twigs and dirty sacks. A distressed young man silently pulls back the cloth to reveal his four-year-old daughter, Anab, who died just hours earlier.

"She was losing weight for weeks and couldn't take any food at the end.

The only thing was milk but we had none left," says grief-stricken Bishar Sigale, waving flies away from the tiny corpse. A few hundred metres away, his neighbours were already digging a grave.

This is the third child Bishar has lost since arriving at Danan, the town at the heart of the Ethiopian food crisis, four months ago. He trekked for a week to get to Danan with his wife and seven children. They arrived with nothing as their donkey collapsed on the way.

All over the camp it's the same story. More than 3,000 families fled here from surrounding villages after the rain failed to come for the fourth year in a row. More are arriving all the time - in search of food and water.

Officially 300 have died here but hundreds more didn't even survive the journey. In every hut mothers and fathers tell of having lost as many as three children on the long, hungry road to Danan. Most of them fell unconscious and passed away quietly on the saddle of a donkey.

But although the camp is cloaked in despair there is no loud wailing or weeping. All is quiet, as mothers nurse their dying children while their husbands bury the dead.

Abshiro Hussein, a beautiful, young woman, kneels over her six-month-old son who has a swollen belly and lies naked in the dirt of her hut. Already she has lost two little girls.

"It's a stomach problem. He has vomiting and diahorrea for the last three days. We think he will die," she says. He needs medicine but there is none. In fact the camp has never been visited by even one doctor or nurse. Measles, diarrhoea and tuberculosis are rife.

Aid workers are reluctant to call this a famine, preferring the phrase "severe drought" because, technically speaking, not enough people have yet died. But in Danan nobody cares about technicalities.

Abdy Hussein insists we come to his hut. Inside, he cradles the frail frame of his dying wife in his arms. He wants the white men to witness to the world on his behalf but it's not easy to look. Maryana is 30 years old and hasn't the strength to sit up. Her eyes are dulled and tight with pain. "She is only hours from death," a local aid worker whispers.

This it the worst drought in eastern Ethiopia in living memory. At first the water in the deepest wells turned salty and then dried up. Later the livestock - the nomads' only source of wealth - collapsed and died in their droves. Now it's the turn of the people to die.

Five years ago they lived well from fertile fields that produced so much food they exported the surplus to other areas. All that is left now is a baked terrain of withered trees and dust swirls whipped up by the oven-hot wind.

The road leading to Danan is littered with the bony carcasses of hundreds of cows, goats and donkeys. At one point a dehydrated donkey stands propped up, like a macabre cardboard cut-out from a village play. Flocks of flesh-eating storks, nicknamed "undertaker birds" wait silently nearby.

There is neither food nor water in the town. The government distributed food last Sunday for the first time in more than a month. Each family received just one kilo of wheat. Unless more aid arrives soon, that will have to do them for another month.

Worse, the wheat is too harsh for the stomachs of malnourished children. They need protein-rich milk and high-energy biscuits but there are precious little of these.

Western aid agencies have only recently found Danan on the map. The only operational agency is Save the Children USA, which distributes a small amount of food to the most needy babies. They are helped by the efforts of a local agency, the Ogaden Welfare Society, but both agencies are swamped by the enormity of the situation.

Specialists from other agencies, such as Nobel prize winners, Medecins Sans Frontieres, have come to look and then flown back to their offices to decide if they will intervene. But it doesn't take a nutritional expert to see that people need food, and they need it now.

"The people tell us we keep coming back with yet more aid workers and newsmen. They want immediate deliveries of food, not more assessments,' says local aid worker Ahmed Ibrahim angrily.

It's a message he will pass on to UN World Food Programme director, Catherine Bertini, when she arrives in the region today surrounded by an entourage of journalists and yet more experts.

Like most western aid agencies, WFP is fearful of sending its staff onto the ground here due to bandit attacks in the countryside. That position may be changed after today's visit.

But while food can be flown or trucked, water is a different matter. SCF has hired two tankers to ferry supplies from a well 12 kilometres away. It's a pitifully small amount for such a vast number of thirsty mouths. Most people get less than one litre a day while the accepted minimum for survival is three.

"The elders told us 'don't bring more food or medicines, bring water first'. They couldn't have been more explicit," says SCF worker Margarite Clark.

The water is distributed from open pits dug into the desert and lined with plastic. Volunteers from the local aid agency, the Ogaden Welfare Society ration the water into dirty containers.

But the busiest men in Danan work over a deep square hole on the edge of town. They take it in turns to dig a grave for yet another child, their sixth in 24 hours. As they descend the soil flies away in the bone-dry breeze. Even at six feet under there is no moisture.

Leaning on his shovel Mohamed Dubat takes a break from the sombre work. This is the fifteenth grave he has dug in the last month. "This is all I have to do since my livestock died. I am 55 years old and I have never seen anything like this. We are on the verge of despair, all our people will die without immediate help."

While the Ethiopian government has been credited for jolting the world into action when it appealed for 800,000 tons of food last January. Later a minister accused the West of waiting to see "skeletons on television" before acting.

But government bureaucracy is still hampering efforts. The Red Cross has thousands of tons of food stored in a warehouse in Nairobi, Kenya. It wants to start airlifting infant food on 40 flights a month - the only obstacle is government clearance.

The head of the Irish aid agency Goal, John O'Shea, arrived in nearby Gode yesterday. Dealing with the Ethiopian government was a "bureaucratic nightmare", he said. "The British and Irish governments have a moral duty to apply pressure and pave the way for the immediate delivery of food."

Across Ethiopia eight million people face starvation this summer if the rains fail. Given the current drought, that looks highly likely.