The Kenyan government said up to four million people were now at risk of starvation in its north, northeast, west and coastal regions, up from 2.5 million, while the United Nations said 1.75 million in southeast and east Ethiopia were now in need of urgent aid, up from about one million.

"We estimate that the number of people in need of food aid has shot up from 2.5 million to between 3.5 million and four million," Kenya's Special Programmes Minister John Munyes told AFP.

The new figure accounts for more than 10 percent of Kenya's total population of 32 million and means the country now 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, he said.

At least 40 people, mainly children in northeast Kenya, have died from drought-related malnutrition and associated illnesses since December and President Mwai Kibaki has declared the situation a national disaster and ordered the military to help in distributing food and water.

Even as Britain's visiting Secretary of State for International Development Hilary Benn announced a contribution of three million pounds (5.3 million dollars, 4.4 million euros) for relief efforts in Kenya, Kibaki said his government was unable to cope.

"We hope for more support to address the situation," Kibaki said in a statement after meeting Benn who later travelled to Wajir, one of Kenya's worst-hit regions about 580 kilometers (360 miles) northeast of Nairobi.

"The situation in Wajir is getting desperate," said Linda Doull, the health director at the British charity Merlin whose feeding station Benn visited where some 145 severely malnourished children have been brought in recent weeks.

WFP said the situation was dire, saying it would run out of food by next month without new contributions and that the lack of response to appeals was distressingly similar to the situation in Niger last year when donors began to respond only after people started dying of hunger.

"Unfortunately our previous warnings and appeals have received a very limited response from donors," WFP spokesman Peter Smerdon told AFP. "We don't want Kenya to become another Niger, where ... donations only increased when people started dying after months of appeals for contributions to prevent deaths."

WFP and the British charity Oxfam warned that the Kenyan military's parallel food distribution system was complicating the delivery of critical assistance because of a lack of monitoring to ensure the aid is directed to those most at need.

"Thousands of lives are being put at risk because of the disintegration of the Kenyan food distribution system," Oxfam said, urging complete restoration of the so-called "single pipeline" delivery system under which the provision of assistance is overseen by the WFP.

Kenyan officials, however, rejected the criticism.

"While they are pushing for 'single pipeline' distribution, the government has made it clear that it will continue with parallel distribution because there are areas where the humanitarian groups cannot access," Munyes said.

Meanwhile, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Aid (OCHA) said that failed rains had left Ethiopia's southeast and east "confronting an escalating humanitarian crisis" with 750,000 more people at risk than the one million previously estimated.

In addition to those at risk in Ethiopia and Kenya, about two million people in Somalia and 150,000 people in Djibouti, nearly a fifth of the population, are also in desperate need of food assistance, it said.

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