Children abandoned on east Africa's "roads of death"

Children abandoned on east Africa's "roads of death" - Somali desperate mothers to leave their dying children on the roadside, as they travel to overwhelmed emergency food centers in drought-hit eastern Africa, UN aid officials said on Monday.

Josette Sheeran, director of the United Nations World Food Program, told a conference in Rome that was a combination of natural disasters and regional conflicts, which more than 12 million people.

"We see all the dots in a position to distribute food completely overwhelmed," she said, adding that a camp in Dadaab in Kenya, which was built for 90,000 people now housed 400,000.

"We want to ensure that the supplies are there along the road, because some of them are always the streets of death, where mothers and their children who are too weak to do it or which are left dead on the road," she said.

Women and children were among the most vulnerable in the crisis, Sheeran said, calling it the "child hunger" given the number of children in danger of death or permanent obliteration of their brain and body through hunger.

The WFP is feeding about 2.5 million malnourished children and trying to raise money for more, she said.

HORRIBLE CHOICE

Said "I think it is the children go hungry because there are those who are most vulnerable children and those are the ones we see are the least likely to make," Sheeran told Reuters.

"We have women that the terrible choice of leaving their children to save the stronger or weaker to die with hearing children in their arms."

Ministers and senior officials met at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome Monday to discuss how the aid after the worst drought in decades in a region that is mobilized from Somalia to Ethiopia, Kenya and Djibouti.

The WFP said it needed an additional $ 360 million in emergency funds. Oxfam said that a total of another $ 1000000000 was necessary to deal with this situation.

The World Bank said in a statement providing more than $ 500 million to help victims of the drought was, in addition to $ 12 million in emergency aid to help those most affected.

Amid warnings that urgent action was needed to halt a humanitarian catastrophe which is on the Horn of Africa, officials said there was still a chance to support people and help them re-living as farmers, fishermen and shepherds.

Governments around the world and the UN have been criticized for its slow response to the severe drought, but they get confronted with serious problems to help a region in the grip of a raging conflict in many parts of southern Somalia.

The UN has declared a famine in two regions of Somalia and warned it could further spread.

Anarchic years of conflict in southern Somalia have aggravated the plight of preventing aid agencies from helping communities in the region. Nearly 135 000 Somalis have fled since January, mainly to neighboring Kenya and Ethiopia.

The WFP has said it can not reach more than 2 million Somalis from starvation in areas controlled by Islamic militants who imposed a ban on food aid in 2010 and regularly threatened relief groups.

Oxfam's Barbara Stocking said it was very difficult for employees to access parts of Somalia, but it was with local partners to provide assistance, and they tried to help them on their support in the current crisis.

(Editing by Karolina Tagaris)