Aid workers lately given access to 1.6 million people uprooted by northern Uganda's civil war say the humanitarian situation is "dire".
"It is a severe, dire humanitarian situation in all places in the north," said Mr Morten Petersen, director of a new European Commission Humanitarian Office (Echo), today.
"All the indicators the humanitarian community normally measure in terms of humanitarian response are far from - far from - being met in northern Uganda," he said.
"We are talking of a five- or ten-fold deficit in terms of water, in terms of latrines. That is really serious," Mr Petersen said.
At least 90 per cent of the local population live in squalid camps because of an 18-year insurgency by Lord's Resistance Army leader Joseph Kony, a dreadlocked fighter who claims to talk to spirits
His group is notorious for routinely targeting unarmed civilians, mutilating its victims and reinforcing its ranks by kidnapping tens of thousands of children.
The Ugandan army says recent victories have fragmented the rebels into small bands reduced to ambushing villagers for food, but Echo said the situation in the north remained "complex and unpredictable".
Echo, the humanitarian donor arm of the European Union, had boosted project funding in northern Uganda to at least €12 million this year from €420,000 in 2001. Until today, its work in the north was co-ordinated from Nairobi.