Peace fails to alleviate Liberian food crisis

DONWEH BAR props up her skeletal frame, wizened beyond her 48 years, with spindly arms wrapped around a twisted cane. Nearby a toddler with protruding belly and ribs eats a few grains of corn meal from her mother's hand.

Despite a peace deal signed on Monday formally ending Liberia's brutal civil war, hundreds of thousand of people many nearly starving are awaiting food aid before they celebrate. While 60 tonnes of food have been delivered by UN groups since West African peacekeepers and US Marines secured the capital's port last week, aid officials concede it is still far too little.

Bar sleeps on a grass mat elbow to elbow with several thousand other refugees jammed in classrooms of an abandoned campus building of the University of Liberia at Fendell, some eight miles east of the capital Monrovia. She cannot remember when she last ate wild leaves and tubers the only food available. "Two days," she said weakly. "No, maybe two weeks."