She was the only one to notice when the emaciated boy's shallow breathing stopped. Only when her shoulders began to shake with tight, constricted, coughing sobs did her husband realise that his youngest child was dead. He lightly touched the boy's hollowed cheeks and then slowly pulled a faded red blanket over his body.

The blanket covered everything but the boy's feet, still cut and calloused from the 10-day walk that had brought the family to this place. His legs rested gently on the rim of a wicker basket that has, in the last week, been a funeral bier for three of the couple's five child-ren. The blanket has been their shroud.

The family's hut is at the edge of a settlement of 9,000 starving people that did not exist a month ago. Now it swells every day as more of southern Ethiopia's desert farmers trudge in from the bush.

Danan, a scrappy village in normal times, is on a road and a road means the chance of food, so the ragged walkers keep arriving. Some have trekked 150 miles - mainly at night to avoid the heat. They have left their villages empty but for dead livestock.

'We had nothing there, we had nothing while we walked and we have nothing here,' said Arish Hassan Ragi, 40, who took 10 days to cover 120 miles from his home village of Abab Karo with his wife and five children. 'Now we are waiting to die.'

Ragi left home with a jerry-can of water, some sugar and a bag of tea leaves. A few days ago aid workers gave him 4.5 kilos of flour for his family of nine. Now that, too, is gone. Four of his children are dead and one is unconscious.

Like most people in the camp, Ragi spends his days lying in the shade trying to conserve energy or listlessly foraging for food. The only place in Danan where there is activity is among a cluster of low red mounds beside the refugee shelters: the burial ground.

Famine has come again to Ethiopia. Sixteen years after TV news reports brought the desperate scenes in the hunger camps into the living rooms of the Western world and sparked the Live Aid rescue of the following year, people are again dying.

So far, the deaths - though information is still sketchy - are 'only' in the thousands. But a catastrophe is imminent.

The United Nations believes that eight million Ethiopians and eight million people in Kenya, Somalia and Sudan are threatened with starvation.

The province of Ogaden, in south-east Ethiopia, is the worst hit. Local people have always had to struggle to scratch a living from the dust, boulders and scrubby bushes. But an unprecedented three years of drought means that the only thing the stony soil now offers is a place to put corpses.

Many say that this time is worse than the early Eighties. 'Even the very old say they can't remember it ever being this bad,' said Walli Mohammed, another farmer who trekked to Danan. 'Before, we could always find something, somewhere to graze the animals. Now it is all gone.'

As he spoke, he stroked the neck of a dying cow. 'She is my favourite, my best cow. She has fed my children,' he said. 'Until I see her die, I won't believe what is happening to us.'

Since the last famine and the fall of the the Soviet-backed Marxist regime of President Mengistu in 1991, the new government has worked hard to guard against a repeat. But since then, the country's population has nearly doubled and the country is deep in debt.

Stores of emergency food are low. Officials say there are now less than 30,000 tons of food left, enough for only another week.

So far, though the European Union and the US have pledged nearly a million tonnes of aid, little has reached the capital, Addis Ababa, let alone the remote regions where people are dying. Reports are coming in of severe problems along the Kenyan border in the South and in the northern Tigray province.

According to the deputy head of the government's Disaster Prevention Planning Committee, Berhane Gizaw, all the aid pumped into Ethiopia after the last famine has done little to stave off the present crisis. 'Most of it was spent on emergency provisions, not long-term development,' he told The Observer .

Though some roads were built with the international cash, the logistical problems now facing aid workers are still huge. Even getting food into Addis Ababa may be impossible.

The continuing war between Ethiopia and Eritrea has sucked up valuable funds and limited access to the small independent port of Djibouti. There are no planes to mount the massive air-lift that might be the only way to stop thousands more deaths.

The few roads that do exist are in appalling condition. Trucks take five days to reach some areas. Some remain inaccessible to vehicles altogether.

Bandits pose another threat. Earlier this month an aid worker in Ogaden was killed after a robbery went wrong.

Many are critical of the time it has taken the international community to react to the crisis. 'We have been screaming about this for a year,' says one World Food Programme adviser. 'It seems it takes dead people on TV to get anything moving.'

Aid workers - partly funded by British groups such as Christian Aid - have set up emergency feeding centres in the small town of Gode, about 50 miles from Danan.

Gode itself is swollen with almost 20,000 refugees and thousands more mob the recently built wickerwork huts in the hospital grounds where high-energy biscuits, re-hydrated milk and oatmeal gruel is distributed from 30- litre saucepans.

Each hut has a roughly drawn placard hanging above the entrance, marking whether it holds children of '50 per cent' of usual body weight, 60 per cent, and so on. One hut simply has TB in 10-inch letters scrawled above the door.

Because of the demand, rations at the centre have been reduced. 'We are afraid we will run out soon,' said Dr Abduraziz Okash.

What everyone knows is that the situation will get worse before it gets better. Even if aid does come in quickly, 90 per cent of Ogaden's cattle and 70 per cent of its sheep are thought to be dead.

The next rains aren't due for six weeks - if they come at all. And then farmers have to plant and tend their crops and somehow re-stock their herds. Many are talking about migrating permanently to Ethiopia's swelling cities - if they survive.

Ahmed Dayid Jama, a local man who is area manager for the Ogaden Welfare Society, knows that every margin here is thin. Indicating first a pile of dead cattle - desiccated by the blistering sun, and dyed red by the dust - and then the bleak, parched, blank deserts beyond, he shook his head sadly.