The Swiss-based humanitarian agency said it was stepping up food distributions in Yemen and Somalia, where rising commodity prices and fighting are taking a heavy toll on destitute people.

"The recent rise in food and fuel prices is making life even harder for poor people already struggling to cope with the effects of war and internal violence," ICRC President Jakob Kellenberger said in a statement accompanying its annual report.

Other war- and poverty-stricken countries such as Afghanistan, Chad and Haiti are also strongly affected, he said.

World prices of basic food commodities have risen steeply in the last year, sparking riots in some countries and potentially forcing millions more people into hunger and malnutrition, according to United Nations agencies.

The ICRC spent 944 million Swiss francs last year for relief projects in hotspots including Iraq and Sudan where basic services such as health care have largely collapsed, according to the report.

Worldwide, it operated water and sanitation projects that benefitted more than 14 million people, and provided supplies to reinforce health care facilities, including Mogadishu hospitals, that treated nearly 2.9 million patients last year.

Sudan, where it deploys more than 1,500 staff, was the ICRC's single largest operation for the fourth straight year in 2007, with a budget of 94 million Swiss.

In the troubled western state of Darfur, where government troops and rebels have been fighting since 2003, the ICRC is one of the few humanitarian groups working in remote rural areas.

It stepped in to run several camps teeming with displaced people, including Gereida in South Darfur which holds 130,000, when other aid agencies left after an attack in late 2006.

The ICRC said it was using mobile surgical teams to fly in and out of hard-to-reach and highly insecure areas, such as Chad and Sudan.

It is also building wells in villages in Afghanistan, Chad, Somalia and elsewhere to provide people with safe drinking water and avoid the need for girls or women to venture out to fetch water, a task which makes them vulnerable to sexual violence.

The agency visited 2,400 places of detention worldwide, which hold more than 500,000 detainees, last year. Those include suspects detained at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo, Cuba, and at American prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"The aim of such visits, based on a confidential dialogue with detainees and the detaining authorities, is to prevent detainees from disappearing or being ill-treated and to ensure that they have decent conditions of detention," the ICRC said.