In Ayder hospital in Mekelle, the capital of Ethiopia's Tigray region, the corridors are filled with the hubbub of any busy medical facility. But in the paediatric wing, there is a stillness to the wards.

For here lie children numbly bearing witness to the latest food crisis to ravage northern Ethiopia. Mostly babies, they are suffering from severe acute malnutrition.

Their mothers sit silently at their beds, staring into the middle distance, clutching their infants to their breast, hoping what milk they have can deliver the salvation for which they yearn.

For they and Ethiopia are suffering once again from a devastating legacy of conflict and drought, twin evils that in recent years have destroyed farms and crops and forced millions from their homes

The government says 16 million people across the country are facing food shortages, with almost half of those suffering emergency or severe levels of food insecurity. That means many are not just hungry, they are starving.

This is why Tsega Tsigabu, 23, and her four-month-old son, Kidisty, are languishing in Ayder hospital.

Her family were farmers. But their crops failed and they moved to Mekelle to try to survive. Like so many others, they ended up in a camp for people forced from their homes.

Mrs Tsega's husband was in the army but he injured his hand and cannot work. She took her baby for a vaccination and the nurses saw instantly it was malnourished.

"Even when I was pregnant, I was not eating a balanced diet," Mrs Tsega tells us. "I was not producing enough breast milk, that's why the baby has developed malnutrition. I just didn't have enough to eat at home."

Doctors at the hospital tell us the numbers of severely malnourished children being admitted have doubled since 2020 when the war between Tigrayan forces and Ethiopian and Eritrean armies began.

A ceasefire was agreed in 2022 but the impact of the conflict still lingers with at least one million people still unable to return home remaining in the region.

We travelled with the British Africa minister, Andrew Mitchell, to Agulae, an hours' drive north into the hills, where a clinic was assessing children from outlying villages.

He watched as anxious mothers lined up to have the circumference of their children's arms measured; the less flesh on the bone, the more likely the malnutrition. The nurses showed him their charts and they all told a similar story of the numbers getting worse.

"There is clearly a risk of famine if we don't now take action," Mr Mitchell said..

"There are serious indicators of the danger of famine. If you ask me, 'Is there a famine taking place now in Ethiopia?' I say no, and we have the power to stop it. But if we don't take the necessary action now, then there is every danger that a famine will engulf this war-torn country which has suffered so much already."

He promised Britain would commit a further £100m ($125m) to help up to three million mothers and babies in Ethiopia get access to health care; a new fund to provide medicines and vaccines designed to end preventable deaths.

But is famine in Ethiopia really likely?

International aid agencies are cautious about using what some call "the F- word".

It has a precise technical definition - 20% of households facing extreme food shortages, 30% of children under five with acute malnutrition, and two people out of every 10,000 dying every day. Few suggest those criteria have been formally met in Ethiopia.

But for Getachew Reda, president of the Tigray interim regional administration, those definitions are otiose.

He said there was an "unfolding famine" in Tigray. The numbers of those "staring death in the eye" were rising all the time, he told us, criticising the international community for its "lacklustre" response.

"One thing I know is that thousands of people who would otherwise have been able to feed themselves are not in a position to feed themselves and are succumbing to death because of starvation," Mr Getachew said.

"Whether you call it famine or a risk of famine or a potential famine, for me it's purely academic… What transpired in 1985, for example, would pale into comparison, if we fail to address the kind of unfolding famine that's staring us in the eye."

What he was referring to were the devastating crises of the mid-1980s when many hundreds of thousands died in a famine in Tigray and elsewhere.

The media’s reporting of the humanitarian disaster prompted a wave of publicity and campaigning, including the Live Aid concert led by the musician Bob Geldof.

These comparisons infuriate the federal government in Addis Ababa which denies there is famine.

Shiferaw Teklemariam, commissioner of the Ethiopian disaster risk management commission, said Ethiopia was a victim of climate change. He warned regional governments against politicising the issue and urged them and the international community to do more.