Only after we've been in the village for several hours does the headman, Dhane Gelgelo, say openly that people as well as animals will die here if the drought goes on.

Gelgelo, 34, has been - very uncomplainingly - telling the story of his community's decline in the face of three years of almost unbroken drought conditions.

"We've lost 1,000 cattle this year alone," he says, "and more are dying all the time."

The ones that do roam the village are in very poor condition, attempting to graze on the useless weeds that make the ground look deceptively green in places.

"There are now 620 households registered as losing their cattle," Gelegelo adds, explaining that villagers used to be willing to make an eight-hour round-trip into the bush to find pasture and browse, but have given up because it's clearly pointless.

At its peak, this community's herd numbered about 6,000 animals; now it's down to about 2,000.

Villagers are surviving either be selling cattle and buying grain shipped in from the highlands - a trade that increasingly works against them as the animals' condition deteriorates - or by selling charcoal at the roadside.

"After all this," Gelgelo says, "we're assuming that people will start to die." And he adds that out in the bush, well away from gravel road that runs through the village and ends at the Kenyan border some 200 kilometres further south, they believe some fellow pastoralists are already dying.

Malnutrition is not dramatically obvious here; there is no feeding centre; no scenes of dehydrated, dying infants that have historically triggered massive food-relief operations in Africa.

But in Melka Guba, a lowland pastoralist community in the Guji-Borena zone with a semi-nomadic tradition, the condition of the animals feels like a warning from the gods: the scrub around the village is strewn with their bones, picked clean by hyenas at night.

Intensified drought

Like most villagers, Konso Aga, 45, eats only twice a day. "Roasted maize seed in the morning for breakfast," she says, "or sometimes kollo [barley]. Boiled maize for dinner."

"I also eat mud bura or ogomde" - wild berries that grow nearby and help pastoralists cope in lean times.

Any fruits, vegetables or dairy products? "Never."

On her lean frame Konso has hung an old mosquito net for a gown, which she nevertheless wears with some panache: these people have not lost hope, or given way to despair. But their plight is quietly desperate.

It's hard to see how, if the drought continues as forecast, human casualties will not indeed begin to follow animal ones.

When the villagers point out that there are no longer any kind of special foodstuffs for children (they transit straight from the breast to boiled or roasted grain), it's not difficult to see why the very young are the always first to fall victim to food-security crises as severe as this.

And the children's "meals" are washed down with water so obviously dirty and unsafe it looks more like tea.

In the nearby town of Negele, Ethiopian Red Cross Society (ERCS) branch members and local officials all agree the drought impact has intensified since a local assessment in July, written in English, of two representative woredas (districts) recommended "immediate" food assistance for more than 140,000 people. (There were only resources available to give to food to less than half that number.)

The conservatively worded assessment spoke of a "majority" of people "sliding from normal nutritional status to malnutrition" as a result of "environmental and market shock" - above all drought. Food-price inflation was also a major issue.

Out of a total of nearly 30,000 children under five, 85 per cent needed emergency feeding; half of nearly 6,500 lactating mothers and pregnant women needed "emergency supplementary feeding".

The Ethiopian assessors reported finding some lactating mothers in an "emaciated" condition.

"The situation here is very bad," according to Salihu Sultan, the head of the ERCS Negele branch that covers the Guji-Borena zone. "The drought is serious in this area," he says, standing above a nearby dried-up Chulul river - one of the most important locally for supplying isolated pastoral communities with water.

Sultan, too, believes people will start to die if it goes on much longer - without emergency relief.

"We're ready to increase our operation significantly," he says, "including supplementary feeding for children, at the request of the government."

Borrowed seed

But Negele, like most local Red Cross Red Crescent branches in the Horn of Africa, desperately needs more resources: food, cash, vehicles, fuel, computers, training.

Sultan and his volunteers see the situation in the parched outback as their first priority. But other vulnerable groups in and around Negele town are also on their watch list.

Like the large community of Marehan tribal pastoralists who lost their cattle to raiders during inter-communal fighting many years ago and have lived in improvised settlements on the edge of town ever since.

Or the Ethiopian refugees who fled to Somalia from the 1974-87 Derg regime and later came back to resettle in Borena.

Or the soldiers-turned-farmers who live together with their families in an old barracks just outside town and who lost their entire crop in the drought that affected the first planting of the year. The men are now trying again with borrowed seed they must repay.

Tesfey Tegany, one former soldier, heaves an ox-drawn plough through a field thick with weeds in the early morning sun. One of the vicious circles subsistence farmers get trapped in, according to the Ethiopian assessment, is that animals become too weak to draw.

For both man and beast, it is brutally hard work.

Demersa Bulti, 56, who first joined up in 1965, explains that the last crop was an almost total write-off, and the next harvest - of wheat - is not expected until mid-March at the earliest (assuming the drought abates).

The arithmetic of drought in this part of Ethiopia is stark: "I used to plant two quintals of grain to get between 25 and 30 quintals to eat," says Bulti. "I got one bag only from the last harvest." In terms of seed used, a loss of 50 per cent.

Asked how they have made up the shortfall, these ex-soldiers - who do not complain lightly either - say simply, they don't; they just eat less.

And in the pinched faces of some, it is certainly possible to see the first signs of what they say is creeping malnutrition.

Ironically, in this very area, where drought seems to be tightening its grip, a recent flash flood damaged peoples homes and caused crop damage.

But this "unexpected rain" is effectively useless, says Sultan. It simply runs off the baked soil and disappears before it can do any good.

The predictable, seasonal rain that farmers everywhere crave is either highly erratic or absent altogether.

Assessment team

Climate experts have projected an increased risk of both drought and floods for Ethiopia, such as those that just displaced more than 50,000 people in the eastern Somali region.

Now the International Federation has called on the world community not to allow the global financial crisis to cause millions of people in the Horn of Africa to continue to go hungry.

It's the second consecutive year in which aid to Africa has fallen, according to the Federation, while assistance to the continent was supposed to double by 2010.

An IFRC assessment team has spent the past three weeks in Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya and Sudan looking for ways the Red Cross Red Crescent can quickly increase its assistance to some of the estimated 17 million people across the region who need help quickly.

An early priority will be to try to limit the growing mortality of livestock among lowland pastoralist communities through the provision of water and fodder.

The International Federation already helps some 200,000 people facing drought and food shortages in and around the Horn of Africa and is planning a significant scaling up of that effort soon.