Sudan has sought $2.6 billion from donors to help its south recover after Africa's longest civil war amid UN warnings of food shortages and calls for Khartoum to end violence in its western Darfur region.
Donors meeting in Oslo made aid pledges exceeding $2billion on the first day of the two-day meeting of 60 nations at which ex-rebels and Sudan's government vowed to stick to their January North-South deal to end 21 years of fighting.
"In the south, we will run out of food for two million people in a matter of weeks," UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan warned delegates of one of the world's poorest regions. "Other critical sectors like water and health are even worse off."
"If ever there was a time for donors to get off the fence, it is now," he said.
A report by the United Nations and World Bank, backed by the Khartoum government and the former rebel Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM), says Sudan needs $2.6 billion in aid up to the end of 2007 to build everything from schools to roads.
"In south Sudan we are starting from scratch," SPLM leader John Garang said.
More than two million people were killed and 4 million displaced by the war that pitted the mainly animist and Christian south against the Arab north in a conflict complicated by issues of oil, ethnicity and ideology.
Among major pledges today, the European Commission promised about $765 million, Britain $545 million, Norway $250 million and the Netherlands $220 million, organisers said. The United States will make a pledge tomorrow.
"There are good indications of funds coming in," Norway's Development Minister and conference host Hilde Frafjord Johnsen said today. Organisers said it was not yet clear, for instance, how much of the cash was new money.
Annan also urged Sudan's First Vice President Ali Osman Mohamed Taha to accelerate efforts to end the separate Darfur conflict and rein in attacks on civilians blamed on Arab militia allied to the government.
Taha reaffirmed Khartoum's "total commitment to its quest for peace in Darfur". Washington calls the fighting in Darfur genocide - a term Khartoum rejects.
And Taha said Khartoum saw no need to extradite Sudanese citizens for possible war crimes trials by the International Criminal Court (ICC). Annan last week gave the ICC a sealed list of 51 people suspected of atrocities in Darfur.
Taha said Sudan was itself investigating in Darfur and that no one was above the law. He added: "in our opinion justice should be done in the context of reconciliation."
Ninety percent of people in southern Sudan live in poverty; only about a third of young adults are literate and one child in four dies before the age of five.
The Darfur crisis was triggered in February 2003 when rebel groups took up arms against the government in a struggle over power and resources in the arid region. Khartoum retaliated by arming nomadic Arab militia, who are accused of a campaign of murder, rape and arson against villagers.
More than 2 million people have fled their homes and tens of thousands have died in the region.