The US ambassador to Ethiopia, David Shinn, and the WFP country representative, Judith Lewis, Wednesday signed the agreement in Addis Ababa for the food aid, valued at 13.5 million US dollars. It includes 5,000 metric tonnes of blended food for supplemntary feeding for malnurished children, lactating mothers and pregnant women.

Shinn stated during the signing ceremony that he had recently toured most of the areas and seen the impact of the failure of the rains.

Lewis said the WFP had been assisting drough-affected people in the country, but regretted as saying: ''Lately our operations to assist thousands of war-affected people was less than one-third funded, and the operation's future was under severe risk.''

Many of the signs of chronic hunger are present -- falling livestock prices, families down to their last handfuls of grain, reports of dying cattle and deserted villages and evidence that the strong are migrating into towns in search of food.

The United Nations in Ethiopia has appealed for nearly $50 million in food aid and other relief for five million people affected by drought.

But donors may find the request hard to stomach as Ethiopia continues to spend millions of dollars on its 13-month border war with its Horn of Africa neighbour, Eritrea.

The war has not contributed directly to the hunger crisis -- which is concentrated in the highland areas of north and south Wello. But U.N. officials say security problems have made their operations more difficult.

Lalibela, a town of ancient churches dug into the side of a mountain, has swelled with more than one thousand displaced people who have left their land because it could no longer guarantee their existence.

``I came (to Lalibela) in May because I was starving,'' Abebe Tesfy, a farmer, told Reuters.

``There was a total failure of the crop. I sold my cattle, my cows and my sheep. The problem has been building up for three years now and (it became critical) because there were no short rains.''

This crisis defies many of the conventional stereotypes about famine.

For a start, scarcity is nothing new to peasants eking out a living in the Ethiopian highlands on land so marginal that every season is a struggle to survive.

Aid workers say that in parts of Ethiopia, mortality for those aged under five is as high as 20 percent even in good times. Many farmers say food levels have reached dangerously low levels in one in every three years in the last decade.

Residents of Guguftu, a village set on a ridge around 3,500 metres (11,500 fet) above sea level, said they had to battle with the failure of the ``belg'' short rains earlier this year, but also with frost, in their attempts to cultivate a meagre wheat crop on a windswept hillside.

Rains have returned to Wello region, helping young crops to shoot up and providing relief to animals able to graze again. But the impression that the crisis may be easing is deceptive, since the next harvest is six months away.

``Things have not been this bad since 1984,'' Judith Lewis, country director for the U.N. World Food Programme, told reporters. ``It is not as bad as '84-85 but if we do nothing it could be.''

Past appeals for Ethiopia have had to compete for attention with more high-profile relief efforts -- such as Kosovo. Privately, aid workers say attracting international assistance this time will be made all the more difficult by the war, to which a diplomatic solution looks as remote as ever.

The Ethiopian government has a ready response.

``We are confronted by two disasters that are externally imposed,'' said Berhane Gizaw, number two at Ethiopia's Disaster Prevention and Preparedness Commission.

Built over an area of 28,000 square meters around the CMC area, in a suburb called Luke Peasant Association the plant will supply Schweppes Pineapple, Schweppes Tonic, Schweppes Mineral Water, Canada Dry Gingerale, Crush Orange and Sport Cola- raising local production of soft drinks by 25%.

The plant will supply the drinks in non-refillable plastic bottles besides the refillable glass bottles customary of all soft drink plants in Ethiopia.

Summit Partners Ethiopia, the owner of the franchise in Ethiopia, said that the high quality products will be exported to earn foreign exchange for the country.

Summit Partners Ethiopia is an American company which plans to open two other plants in Ethiopia with a total investment outlay of $100 million in the coming years.

A plastic sack factory, the construction of which will be completed in December 1999 and a bottle factory which will be set up in Dire Dawa are the two remaining projects this company envisages, according to a report by the government daily, Ethiopian Herald.

A soft drinks company in the Dire Dawa area will also be set up, the paper said.

The income earned in the past fiscal year ending on June 30,1999, exceeds that of the previous year by 57 percent, the Ethiopian News Agency reported Tuesday.

The stated sum of money was obtained from the export of coffee, fruits, vegetables, corns and khat (a stimulant chewed as tea) to the neighboring countries, Europe and the Asia-Pacific region.

The bulk of coffee went to Japan, Saudi Arabia, Britain and Switzerland while a significant amount of khat, fruits, vegetables and corns had been exported to Djibouti and Lebanon, according to the Dire-Dawa Export Trade Branch Office.

Four and a half years after the trial began, former agriculture minister Geremew Deble was on Monday found guilty and sentenced to eight years in prison by the High Court in Addis Ababa for ``his role in genocide,'' the state-run newspaper Addis Zemen said on Tuesday.

Geremew served in the government of dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam and was among around 5,200 officials charged with war crimes, genocide and human rights violations allegedly committed during the

``Red Terror'' campaign of 1977-78 in which tens of thousands of people were killed or tortured. Mengistu himself, who fled to Zimbabwe in 1991 just before rebels took Addis Ababa, is one of 3,000 officials being tried in absentia.

The remainder, including Geremew, have been in custody since the early 1990s and the slow pace of the trial has alarmed human rights groups.

The newspaper did not say what specific crimes Geremew had been found guilty of but said he was acquitted on a charge of ordering the execution of an employee of Addis Ababa City Mortuary.

``The testimony of four prosecution witnesses presented against Geremew was based on hearsay as none of them were present when the alleged execution took place,'' the paper quoted the court as saying in its summation.

He will serve just one more year in prison because he has already been in detention for seven years.