By Sky News

Aid agencies are warning of a new famine in Ethiopia with six million people in need of emergency food aid, after months of drought and rising food prices.

The crisis is one of the most serious the country has faced in decades.

Children under the age of five are the worst affected, with more than 126,000 suffering from severe malnutrition, according to Unicef.

In the stricken regions aid organisations are working with the Ethiopian government to set up therapeutic feeding centres for those most at risk.

One, operated by Medecins Sans Frontieres in the western town of Shashemene, is crowded with mothers clutching listless infants with stick limbs and dead eyes.

Three-year-old Mitchu weighs just 11lbs - a little more than a newborn baby.

Her flesh has been stripped from her bones by starvation and malaria.

She has been receiving food every three hours for two weeks but has not gained any weight and doctors admit she is unlikely to survive.

Others recover quickly, revived by the high calorie, high protein plumpynut paste which has saved millions of lives in food crises around the world, but in Ethiopia it is in short supply.

The lack of resources means that the clinics can only treat the children with medical complications as a result of malnutrition - the merely thin and hungry are turned away.

One desperate father circled his thumb and finger around his daughter's tiny leg.

"She needs help," he pleaded with one of the nurses.

She had to explain that his daughter was not ill enough to be admitted.

"It's difficult but we have to prioritise to save lives here," nurse Meike Steenssens said.

The relief operation is lagging far behind the unfolding crisis and some organisations have criticised the Ethiopian government for being slow to act.

But global factors have contributed to the spread of hunger in the country and complicated the response.

The UN's World Food Programme has a shortfall of 180,000 tons of food in the country, in part because the price of grain has soared on the world markets, and is appealing for £75m to bolster its supplies.

The famine is taking hold in a country which appears green and lush rather than barren, but the crops poking through the soil are months away from being harvested and the cattle being herded through the fields are too scrawny to produce much meat.

Severe drought has affected six of Ethiopia's nine regions and now the rains have finally started, some of the same areas are being stricken by flash floods.

Nature has made self sufficiency almost impossible.

Ethiopia's last major famine between 1984 and 1985 claimed a million lives and prompted a worldwide outcry that sparked Live Aid.

A quarter of a century on, the scale of the problem is much smaller but the images of starving children are the same.