Burma's military government raised its death toll from cyclone Nargis on Tuesday to nearly 22,500 with a further 41,000 missing, nearly all of them from a massive storm surge that swept into the Irrawaddy delta. The United Nations' World Food Programme began doling out emergency rice in Rangoon and the first batch of more than $10 million worth of foreign aid arrived from Thailand on Tuesday, but a lack of specialised equipment slowed distribution.

The ADB is set to make loans worth hundreds of millions of dollars to several Asian nations which have asked for emergency budget assistance to combat soaring food prices, ADB President Haruhiko Kuroda said on Tuesday. "A few countries have expressed their wish to seek some financial assistance from ADB," Kuroda told Reuters in an interview on the sidelines of the Asian Development Bank's annual meeting in Madrid, confirming for the first time that the Manila-based lender had received formal requests for cash.

The United States will donate $10 million in emergency food aid and another $30 million in food aid through a three-year school feeding programme in the country. "The primary beneficiaries of the new $10 million emergency food aid will be those still struggling to recover from the devastating effects of cyclone Sidr,' said US Ambassador to Bangladesh James F Moriarty at a press conference at the American Recreation Association in the city yesterday.

Amid a deepening world hunger crisis, leading food aid groups are calling for a

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) will provide approximately 90,000 metric tons of food aid worth $67.8 million to Bangladesh this year. One third of the food aid will be used to assist Cyclone Sidr affected people of Barguna and Bagerhat districts and the rest will be distributed as part of the USAID's regular food aid programmes in the flood-prone and seasonally food insecure areas of the country, a US Embassy press release yesterday said.

in december 2007, the Chhattisgarh government estimated that the state had 2.14 million people below poverty line (bpl) families in the state. A month later, while launching a new food assistance

The international charity group Care has turned down a donation of us $46 million a year worth of grain from the us government saying the country's food aid system does "more harm than good'.

the central government's food assistance schemes haven't worked. The 61st round of the National Sample Survey Organisation (nsso) report on Public Distribution System and Other Sources of