UN agencies said they were hoping for hundreds of millions of dollars in aid pledges for the drought-stricken Horn of Africa region at a high-level emergency conference to be held in Rome next Monday.

"We are expecting a higher level of international awareness and support," Cristina Amaral, who coordinates emergency operations in Africa for the Rome-based UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, told AFP in an interview.

"We have been giving early warnings since October last year but the humanitarian response was not scaled up to the level needed," Amaral said.

The United Nations has warned more than 10 million people need food aid in the region, where the crisis is particularly acute in conflict-hit Somalia.

Hundreds of thousands of starving refugees have streamed from Somalia into Kenya in recent weeks, often walking for weeks in search for food.

The Rome meeting -- a French initiative as part of its chairmanship of the G20 group of top world economies -- was announced on Monday by French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe on the sidelines of ministerial talks in Brussels.

"France has asked for and obtained a meeting in Rome... to launch a special aid programme for Somalia," Juppe told reporters in Brussels.

British Prime Minister David Cameron meanwhile said during a trip to South Africa that the drought was "the most catastrophic" in a generation.

"Tens of thousands may have died already, many of them children under five," he said, calling on the international community to boost aid pledges.

The UN estimates around $1 billion (711 million euros) in aid is needed for the Horn of Africa region, including Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia.

FAO said it was seeking an extra $70 million for Somalia alone.

The World Food Programme, another UN aid agency in Rome which is seeking access to parts of Somalia held by the Islamist Shebab rebels where the situation is particularly desperate, said it needed $190 million.

"We deeply hope that operating conditions will allow us to return," said Frances Kennedy, a spokeswoman for WFP, which pulled out of parts of Somalia last year due to security concerns and restrictions imposed by the Shebab.

"It's an ongoing dialogue to attempt to unlock this," she said.

The first UN airlift into rebel-held areas landed on Wednesday in the town of Baidoa, containing five metric tonnes of food and medicine.

Amaral said that while the crisis is extremely serious it is not yet at the level of the famines that struck Ethiopia and Somalia in the 1980s and 1990s.

"In some of the areas the situation is very, very serious but we are not yet talking about a famine," Amaral said. "It's time to start to be better prepared. It's time to put in place long term measures," she added.

"With climate change, we're facing more variability," she said.

"There is poor availability of local cereals in southern Somalia, which is the bread basket. Prices are beyond reach and the local harvest has been very poor... We estimate approximately 2.85 million people will need aid."

Amaral called for a stepping up for programmes to improve management of pastures, to vaccinate animals and to ensure better nourishment for children as well as the introduction of new, more resilient varieties of seed.

Mario Zappacosta, a FAO expert, said: "Drought is chronic in most of these pastoralist areas but the situation is even more explosive this year because of the price of fuel and grain and because of civil insecurity."

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