
Hopes have turned to a meeting of Southeast Asian foreign ministers today for a breakthrough in speeding up aid flows to the millions of desperate cyclone survivors in Burma.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon will travel to Burma this week to put pressure on the country's military rulers to open more channels for help.
His spokeswoman said she also expected an international conference in Bangkok on 24 May to marshal funds for the relief effort.
The Association of Southeast Asian Nations foreign ministers will meet today in Singapore.
Aid has been trickling into the country but the junta, suspicious of the outside world, has been reluctant to admit major foreign relief operations and the workers to run them.
The World Food Programme says it has managed to get rice and beans to 212,000 of the 750,000 people it thinks are most in need.
Asian nations considered friendly by Burma were sending in aid teams and an ASEAN assessment team was on the ground, he said.
That team is due to report to the meeting in Singapore. It is expected that other countries would make their contributions through this channel.
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