Somali Islamist rebels have accused the United Nations of exaggerating the severity of the drought gripping the south of the country and of politicising the humanitarian crisis there.
The UN is launching its biggest ever relief effort having declared famine in two pockets of southern Somalia. It said 3.7 million people risk starvation.
The south of the horn of Africa country is largely controlled by the al-Qaeda-linked militants whose four-year insurgency is widely blamed for exacerbating the impact of the drought.
"We say [the U.N. declaration] is totally, 100 per cent wrong and baseless propaganda. Yes there is drought but the conditions are not as bad as they say," al Shabaab spokesman Sheikh Ali Mohamud Rage told a media briefing.
However the UN warned al Shabaab and its followers "have another objective and it wouldn't surprise us if they were politicising the situation. If the international community does not tackle the emergency swiftly, the famine will spread to all eight regions of southern Somalia", the organisation said.
In early July, the rebels lifted a ban on food aid which they had said created dependency. The UN World Food Programme (WFP), which suspended its operations in the south of the anarchic country in January 2010, yesterday said it planned to start airlifts into Mogadishu within days.
On Wednesday it said food would be transported overland southwards to the two famine-hit regions of Bakool and Lower Shabelle.
Kenya urged the WFP to open more feeding centres in Somalia to stem the flow of refugees across its porous border.
In a briefing today the UN said as Somali displacement grows, refugee camps report increasing numbers of deaths and an average of 1,000 people arriving in Mogadishu each day seeking help.
Latest UN figures show that in already in July more than 20,000 people arrived in Mogadishu in search of assistance. More than half came from Lower Shabelle, one of the regions where famine has been declared. Another 2,800 were originated from the Bakool region, whose southern area has also been struck by famine. A further 6,100 people were displaced from the Bay region while almost 1,000 people were displaced from Middle Shabelle.
"In no other country could the UN declare a famine," said Simon Levine of the Overseas Development Institute, a think tank in London. "You couldn't do that in any other country in the world because the F-word is too emotive. Somalia is different." Rashid Abdi, a Somalia analyst at the International Crisis Group, said the scale of the crisis would probably force al Shabaab to cooperate more closely with aid agencies. "They [al Shabaab] are desperate not to be seen as people who oversaw a large-scale humanitarian disaster in southern Somalia," said Mr Abdi.
But he said al Shabaab was likely to impose some restrictions on aid operations and described the hardline group as "generally paranoid about any organisation that has a Western label".
Mr Levine slammed the international community for failing to avert a famine in the 21st century, denouncing the humanitarian aid system as "dysfunctional".
"We have lots of humanitarian organisations who are partly in competition with each other, fighting for territory, all busy doing their own things," he said.