By Peter Apps

LONDON, Sept 4 (Reuters) - New violence in central Africa is raising food aid needs, aid workers say, while the effects of drought are becoming more severe in the continent's south.

Drought and fighting have increased the number of people needing food assistance in Somalia to more than a million and some local surveys suggest attacks on aid convoys in Sudan's Darfur are pushing many into acute malnutrition.

Fighting has flared in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo in recent months, with troops clashing with fighters loyal to a dissident ethnic Tutsi general. The United Nations said on Tuesday 10,000 refugees had fled to neighbouring Uganda.

"The DRC is the big problem at the moment," UN World Food Programme (WFP) spokesman Peter Smerdon said. "We estimate around 200,000 people have fled their homes as (of) December and the number is continuing to rise. In the last year, needs there have tripled and we are only able to provide half rations."

WFP said it was ready to distribute 1 tonne of basic food supplies by helicopter to the new refugees in Uganda.

Good roads are non-existent and the vast country has long been one of the most difficult places to provide relief. A five-year war that aid agencies said killed some 3.8 million people ended in 2003 but one report suggested a thousand people a day continued to die from violence, malnutrition and disease.

In Sudan's Darfur region, increased attacks on the world's largest humanitarian operation have forced many aid agencies to cut back; and local surveys by groups suggest malnutrition rates may be rising back to emergency levels.

"We are waiting on the results of a larger survey that should report early next month," said WFP's Smerdon.

Another UN assessment team is currently in Ethiopia's remote Ogaden region bordering Somalia, where the government is fighting a counterinsurgency campaign against rebels who accuse them of creating "man-made famine".

Rights groups accuse the government of blocking food shipments and commercial trucks, while both the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) say they have been blocked from Ogaden.

SOUTHERN HOPE?

Ethiopia denies blocking MSF, but the group says its staff were denied access on an assessment mission but did see enough to report burned villages.

"I think we are missing a big thing that is happening under our eyes," MSF Ethiopia coordinator Loris De Filippi told a news conference in Nairobi.

In east Africa, conditions have been much better than last year when drought hit the entire region.

In southern Africa, where dry weather and the impact of the world's highest AIDS rates have led to five years of food shortages, food stocks in Zimbabwe and the mountain kingdoms of Swaziland and Lesotho are being exhausted. Shortages will peak in the first few months of 2008.

Malawi and Zambia, however, have contributed food to WFP this year, reducing dependence on currently expensive South African maize. Aid workers say in Malawi in particular government subsidies for fertiliser were key.

"It is a good news story," said WFP southern Africa spokesman Richard Lee." It shows the situation in southern Africa is not entirely hopeless."

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