Tired of living on handouts, Eritrean refugee Hansu Hagos dreams of being able to feed herself by growing millet, maize, sorghum and wheat. Looking around Adikashi refugee camp, perched on the edge of a formidable landscape of flinty, volcanic rock, it is clear that Hansu's dream is far from her reach. Four years of drought in the Horn of Africa country of more than three million have reduced fertile fields to barren tracts of rocky ground, forcing farmers to rely on food aid.
Instead of working the land, 47-year-old Hagos queues for food rations along with thousands like her, who were also forced from their homes during a bitter two-year frontier war with neighbouring giant Ethiopia.
"Those people donating food, they must be as tired of giving as we are of taking," Hagos sighed.
"I'm waiting for the government to decide where I should go. I expect the government to build me a house and give me a plot of land," she added, hopefully.
The UN World Food Programme and other relief agencies say parched Eritrea is facing total crop failure in its key agricultural belt, including Adikashi camp's Gash Barka region, a former breadbasket.
With changing rainfall patterns forecast for next year, the crisis is expected to deepen.
Braying donkeys carrying donations of cereals, pulses and cooking oil are hustled and prodded into Adikashi.
Groups of emaciated young children, some whose heads seem too large for their tiny frames, chase each other around the neatly stacked piles of US grain.
Corn soya blend is provided to tackle malnutrition, which in some areas the government says has reached 19 percent, well beyond the 15 percent that aid workers consider an emergency.
Hagos quietly watches the children play. Born in what is now Eritrea, she was caught on the wrong side of the border when war broke out with Ethiopia in 1998.
She was kicked out of her village in Welqayit by Ethiopian soldiers, who she says looted her property and imprisoned the men in her family.
"It brought shame to me and my family," she said. "Even now, the shame is still there because I cannot farm, I cannot help myself."
Ethiopia said in November it accepted "in principle" the ruling of an independent border commission on where the 1,000 km (620 miles)-long frontier lies - a key part of a peace deal in 2000 that ended a war that killed 70,000 people.
Despite the breakthrough, prime farming land remains out of bounds as it cuts across the undefined border and into a 25 km (15 miles) wide buffer zone separating the two sides. Undetected landmines are constant source of danger.
Aid workers say two million people will depend on food aid in 2005 to survive, and the government predicts 505,000 tonnes will be needed to plug the shortfall.
In an effort to help, the United States sent more than 61,000 tonnes of wheat to Eritrea in November - its biggest shipment of food aid since independence from Ethiopia in 1993.
Experts believe it will be hard for Eritrea to ever defeat a combination of forbidding topography, poverty and uncooperative weather.
Soil erosion has intensified since 19th century Italian colonialists planted cacti on mountain escarpments to prevent the earth from slipping away.
Temperatures regularly top 40 degrees centigrade (104 degrees Fahrenheit), while rain falls increasingly on areas that do not traditionally grow crops. Both are symptoms of climate change blighting other east African countries, and of the expanding Sahara desert.
Not only have Eritrean farmers had to contend with meagre rains, but this year a plague of beetles and grasshoppers destroyed the crops they were carefully nurturing.
The government is desperately searching for a long-term solution by building dams for irrigation.
"The emphasis is on improving agriculture, but of course that requires investment," said Teclemichael Weldegeorgis, deputy commissioner for the government-funded Eritrean Relief and Refugee Commission.
With limited foreign reserves in its central bank, and much of the available workforce carrying out national service duties, Eritrea appears ill-equipped to feed its population.
"I don't think Eritrea can ever produce sufficient food to cover all its needs," said WFP Country Director Jean-Pierre Cebron. "It's a most terrible landscape. Even if they invested a lot of money they don't have, and if they doubled production, they would only fulfil 40 percent of the country's needs."
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