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 15 May 2008 20:26 BST

UN to resume Burma relief flights

Friday, 09 May 2008 20:06
True scale of devastation wreaked by Cyclone Nargis in Burma not yet revealed, United Nations warns
The United Nations will resume aid flights to Burma on Saturday, despite the country's military rulers impounding food supplies intended for victims of Cyclone Nargis.

The World Food Programme (WFP) will proceed with two relief flights tomorrow as originally planned, while discussions continue with the Burmese government over food flown in today but not yet released.

Up to 115,000 people will be able to be fed by the high-energy biscuits, although more than 1.5 million survivors are said to be in dire need of supplies.

Earlier the UN warned the true scale of the devastation wreaked by Cyclone Nargis in Burma was yet to be revealed.

Burmese officials claim that 22,000 people have been killed by the storm, but other estimates put the death-toll higher at 100,000.

Burma's military rulers and outside observers are agreed however that the country's southern delta regions have been comprehensively ruined by the cyclone, with the majority of the Irrawaddy Delta underwater.

A spokesperson for the WFP said the true extent of the disaster was likely to become apparent in the coming days.

"The full scale of this crisis has not revealed itself yet," the representative told inthenews.co.uk.

The warning comes as aid from the WFP continues to trickle into the south-east Asian country.

Despite aid being delivered to Burma through regional governments such as India and China, as well as a host of other aid agencies such as the Myanmar Red Cross, up to 1.5 million people are in urgent need of relief.

One metric tonne of the WFP's high-energy biscuits can feed 2,500 people for a day, meaning the current aid arriving in the country falls far short of the required amount.

"This is a good start but it will not be sufficient to deal with a crisis of this scale," the WFP spokesperson added.

"We need aid flights to be arriving in Burma around the clock."

The WFP spokesperson explained that "bureaucratic and diplomatic" obstacles were clearly hindering aid efforts.

"We are dealing with a country that historically has been quite suspicious of international intervention," he said.

"We are reassuring authorities that our motives are purely humanitarian."

On Thursday the UK Foreign Office issued a direct appeal to the Burmese authorities to remove travel restrictions for aid workers, and the WFP says the current pace of granting visas is "not nearly fast enough".

The spokesperson added the destruction witnessed in Burma was relatively similar to the devastation experienced by individual countries affected by the Asian Boxing Day tsunami.

"It is very difficult at this stage to say when all the aid will be there and how long [the affected regions] will take to recover," he explained.

"But we are looking at least several months and probably a year."

On Friday the UN is due to issue its first appeal over the Burma crisis, including an updated death-toll forecast and the number of survivors in need of emergency aid.End of story

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