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NAWEET, Uganda - The UN World Food Programme launched an emergency food programme today for half a million people in Uganda's northeastern Karamoja region, hit by a devastating third drought in six years.
WFP food trucks rolled into the semi-arid region to dump bags of maize and beans as lean, hungry villagers lined up to receive their rations.
Looyan Kapis, who said she was too old to remember her age, wept as she said she had not eaten for days.
"Look at us -- we are dying," she said, gesturing towards another elderly lady too weak from hunger to lift her head off the ground.
"We resorted to eating leaves foraged from trees that give stomach pains. But there's nothing else to eat."
WFP officials said levels of child malnutrition in the region had reached "emergency levels", with 16 per cent of children malnourished in some places.
The food supplies will be distributed for several months throughout the semi-arid region where sorghum crops failed due to poor rains, aid workers said.
"We planted sorghum, it germinated, then the rain disappeared and it was all destroyed," said Choko Lomugele, 30, as she opened her thatched food granary to reveal nothing but a lizard scuttling over a few empty plastic pots.
Like much of the Horn of Africa region, Karamoja is plagued by frequent drought and food shortages made worse by banditry and inter-clan warfare.
But aid workers say drought cycles are worsening, with rains failing every two years, withering crops and killing livestock.
"The droughts seem to be getting worse," James Feeny, head of WFP for Karamoja, told Reuters. "They used to be every five years, now it's more like every two years."
As water and pasture run out, conflict among Karamojong warriors and with neighbouring Kenya's Turkana tribes has grown, fuelled by a flood of readily available semi-automatic weapons.
Drought and insecurity have left Karamoja Uganda's least developed region, the UN says.
- REUTERS
