Wargadud, Kenya - Herds of animals pull in from all directions, kicking up clouds of dust beneath a baking sun as they converge on a concrete cylinder in the village of Wargadud, north- east Kenya. Many of the pastoralists leading the herds have walked over 20 kilometres through blasted brushland to reach the borehole and fetch water.
The scene at the water source is hectic - hundreds of camels, goats and cows mill around, bleating and lowing as they press forward to drink from the congested borehole.
The chaos is the result of a drought that followed the failure of the short rains late last year. Ten million people are facing hunger as a result, according to the Kenyan government.
The Wargadud borehole, in Mandera district, now pumps water 24 hours a day to meet the demand. All the natural rainwater catchments in the area have long since dried up.
Aid agencies say that up to 30 per cent of animal stocks in the wider area have perished, while the rest are producing little, if any, milk.
"During the day, we don't eat," says Abdullahi Abdi Hussein, 65, the official in charge of the borehole. "We only have one meal a day, when we used to have three."
So far people are not dying in any numbers.
But aid agencies say it is only a matter of time before children and the elderly start perishing from hunger-related illnesses, particularly if the long rains, which generally arrive in March, also fail.
"If people become malnourished, their immune system is depressed so they get sick for other reasons and that is what pushes them over the edge," says Peter Smerdon, a Nairobi-based spokesman for the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP).
There is no great optimism that the rains will come. Kenyan pastoralists say the rains have failed with greater frequency over the last decade - a trend experts say is being driven by climate change.
Hussein believes the point of no return is very close.
Children are already falling ill, he says, and people are turning to desperate measures to fend off hunger pangs, such as eating gum from the ubiquitous Acacia tree.
"It fills the stomach, but has no nutritional value," he says.
Kenya's arid north has been hit hard by the drought - partly because it is so remote and neglected by the government.
But the drought has also affected the rest of the country, combining with other factors to produce a nationwide food shortage.
Last year's post-election violence displaced many farmers, meaning that fields lay fallow instead of producing crops. An increase in the cost of fertilizers led to even less productivity as farmers cut back.
The failure of the rains then exacerbated the situation.
Food prices, driven partly by global pressures, have also shot up and people are struggling to afford staples such as maize.
Then there is the issue of corruption, with government officials accused of selling on maize intended to deal with the shortage to Southern Sudan.
But while the cumulative effect is that millions in Kenya need food aid, there is not enough to go round.
The WFP aims to scale up its operation to include 3.2 million people, from the current 1.2 million receiving aid deliveries. It plans to ask donors for 135 million dollars to fund its operations over the next six months.
But the experience of other agencies suggests the WFP may struggle to raise the cash.
Analysts have been warning that the global financial crisis may lead to drop in aid to Africa. It seems their predictions are coming true.
The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) in December launched an appeal for 95 million dollars to feed 2.3 million people in Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia and Djibouti.
This figure did not take into account the full extent of the crisis in Kenya and is expected to rise to around 150 million.
However, according to Andrei Engstrand-Neacsu, the IFRC's communications manager in Nairobi, only 6 per cent of the original target has been pledged.
"When governments of the world were busy bailing out banks and spending billions, it is a shame that for a fraction of that we can't intervene to save millions of lives," he says.
Engstrand-Neacsu says the world must act before it is too late.
"We want to avoid images of skeletal African children on TV screens and suddenly see the world trying to react," he says. "Should we wait until people start dying before we do something?"
