"The distribution has major problems in it and has not reached the people in need," said Brendon Cox, spokesman for British aid group Oxfam in Kenya, as the number of those requiring food aid to survive continued to rise at an alarming rate.

The United Nations estimates that up to 11 million people in four east African countries -- Kenya, Ethiopia, Somalia and Djibouti -- are on the brink of starvation.

Most of those are Kenya's north, northeast, west and coastal regions where the government this week raised its estimate of those at risk of famine and in need of urgent aid to up to four million, nearly double an earlier projection of 2.5 million.

At least 40 people, mainly children in the northeast, have already died of drought-related malnutrition and associated diseases and President Mwai Kibaki has declared the situation a national disaster, ordering out the military to assist in aid distribution.

International donors have been slow to respond to appeals and the Kenyan government's delivery of the food aid it has in stock has been criticized for inefficiency and cronyism.

"The fact that contributions have been very poor is very worrying," said Peter Smerdon, a spokesman for the World Food Programme (WFP) in Nairobi, noting that without immediate new donations, his agency will run out of relief supplies by the end of February.

At the same time, as the number of needy people shoots up, relief groups say the breakdown of the so-called "single pipeline" aid delivery system, under which the provision of assistance is overseen by the WFP, has complicated matters and may lead to more deaths.

"Thousands of lives are being put at risk because of the disintegration of the Kenyan food distribution system," Oxfam said earlier this week, lamenting that the government's delivery methods are inadequate.

Among other deficiencies, it said military aid convoys were routinely dumping supplies in villages without any monitoring mechanism, leading to some assistance ending up for sale in markets, and distributing food to local chiefs who were in turn passing food only to their allies.

The government has defended its system, maintaining that the aid groups are concentrated only in specific areas.

"As a government, we could not stand and look at people starving," spokesman Alfred Mutua said. "WFP was only covering a certain part of the population. We were forced to use our network to save the lives of our people. At the end of the day, people were saved."

Meanwhile, local relief organizations complain that their international counterparts are not making the case for outside emergency help as forcefully as they should.

With the new figures of those in need, Kenya now says it needs 263 million dollars (217 million euros) in emergency donor aid to fill a relief funding shortfall that was earlier estimated at 150 million dollars.

There is "only a local response so far," said Abbas Gullet, director of the Kenya Red Cross. "International NGOs are working on it, they are appealing but (we see) no facts on the ground. Donors have not given enough money for Kenya. There is a potential for more life to be lost."

As the crisis continues, the potential for non-hunger deaths rises, particularly in arid northern Kenya where inter-clan fighting among nomadic pastoralist tribes over scarce water and pasture is common even in non-drought conditions.

Last week, at least 38 people were killed in northwestern Kenya in cattle raids by Sudanese and Ethiopian herders that officials say were linked to the drought.

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