He said donor governments, United Nations and other private relief agencies should pay less attention to the degree of media attention on a crisis and take greater account of the amount of suffering when they fund emergency aid.

"We all know there is a trend, which is to a certain extent inevitable, of channeling aid to those situations that have a larger impact in public opinion, that are more present in the media," the UN High Commissioner for Refugees said.

He said there was a risk that some of the "most pressing needs" would "be forgotten because they are not sufficiently present in global public opinion."

Guterres was speaking in Geneva on the margins of a regular meeting between representatives of aid agencies and donor states about the 4.7 billion-dollar UN appeal for relief aid to deal with crises in 2006.

The equivalent global appeal last year netted 64 percent of some 5.9 billion sought, according to the latest UN data, including 85 percent of the emergency funding for the Indian Ocean tsunami.

In contrast, donor governments gave aid agencies just 35 to 55 percent of funding needed to cope with refugee crises, natural disasters or drought in many African countries, echoing a persistent pattern in recent years.

The UN refugee chief highlighted unrest in the north of the impoverished Central African Republic as just one example of the trend.

Some 40,000 people have fled into neighbouring Chad, and Guterres said the crisis was turning into a regional security problem that could destabilise Chad as well as Cameroon.

"It is an area in which the international community could be effective in prevention, and if that were not the case the international community might be facing a major tragedy in the months or years or come," he said.

Donors granted less than 10 million of the 28 million dollars earmarked for relief aid in the Central African Republic last year. Aid agencies want nearly 47 million dollars to help the country in 2006.

"I could go on and on with more and more problems, and to be honest I sometimes don't know what to do, how to raise awareness," Gutteres remarked.

Red Cross officials said they were going ahead with food deliveries for 37,000 families in Malawi this week in spite of a "weak response" to their appeal for 30 million dollars to deal with hunger in seven southern African nations.

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