Aid officials gave warning yesterday that time was running out to feed millions of people at risk of starvation in Somalia, where a war-ravaged population faces its worst humanitarian crisis in 17 years.

Piracy and lawlessness in the capital, Mogadishu, have long made aid operations extremely hazardous. Yesterday, as port workers unloaded sacks of sorghum from a Panamanian-registered cargo ship, United Nations officials said that they desperately needed naval vessels to provide escorts for future aid shipments. At the end of the month the Canadian Navy will withdraw its frigate, HMCS Ville de Quebec, from the region, leaving cargo ships with no defence against the pirates.

Denise Brown, deputy country director of the World Food Programme in Somalia, said that tonnes of food were being brought in to South Africa with no means to deliver it to people in need. “We do not have a firm offer for any naval escort and we have 45,000 tonnes of food which needs to be distributed in October,” she told The Times by telephone from Nairobi.

Three WFP-contracted ships were hijacked during 2005 and 2006, but none has been seized since the escorts began last year. Frigates from France, Denmark and the Netherlands have each taken a turn.

Two decades of clan violence, warlord power struggles and repeated droughts have left millions of people hungry. This year the rains were well below average – the fourth successive failure - as drought swept the entire Horn of Africa.

Fighting has intensified in recent months as Islamist fighters seized key towns from a weak, interim government, adding thousands more to a displaced population.

At the same time, a global food and fuel crisis has sent the price of staples soaring by as much as 600 per cent in parts of the country.

The result is that almost half of Somalia’s population of seven million people - most desperately poor - is in desperate need of food deliveries.

Analysts believe that all the factors are in place for a disaster on the scale of the 1991-93 famine that killed hundreds of thousands of people.

In all, about 150,000 tonnes of food are needed to feed the country for the rest of the year. Ms Brown said that deliveries by sea were crucial. “This is a critical lifeline. Without a ship we would only have 10 per cent of our requirements in Somalia,” she said.

The Food and Agriculture Organisation’s Food Analysis Unit said recently: “All information indicates that the key factors driving this humanitarian crisis will continue to worsen over the coming months.”

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