Our East Africa correspondent, Martin Dawes, has just returned from Bahr el Ghazal. In the village of Turalei, women are scavenging in the dusty fields for grass seed which will be pounded into paste to feed aching bellies. People are eating leaves and wild fruit. It's the only food available to them. Last year, the crops failed.
Rains are imminent, but there are no seeds.
A day's walk away is a feeding centre, but only the strongest or the most desperate make the journey. The emergency response is having difficulty catching up because of a ban on aid flights imposed by the Sudanese government. As fighting displaced tens of thousands of people, the regime in Khartoum prove deaf to entreaties for relief flights. It's just given permission for the air bridge to be reopened, but it's made it clear that if the humanitarian organisations are so concerned then they should put pressure on the rebels in the south to agree to a ceasefire. The mixing of aid and politics by the government of Sudan suggests a cynical use of people's lives as a bargaining chip.