Gacimi.com

A sweeping drought across East Africa has left millions of people at risk of starvation, in a region plagued by increasingly erratic rainfall, humanitarian organisations and officials warn.

Huge food shortages and loss of livelihood have left 6.2 million Ethiopians needing relief aid, while about 3.8 million in Kenya's arid areas, where livestock is being decimated, have also been affected, UN agencies say.

War-ravaged Somalia, meanwhile, is witnessing its worst humanitarian crisis since civil unrest erupted there two decades ago, with a third of its 10 million people in need of food assistance and one in every five children acutely malnourished.

For Kenya, "this is the worst (drought) in nearly a decade. One in ten Kenyans are in need of food assistance," said Marcus Prior, a World Food Programme spokesman in Nairobi.