Myanmar's military government yesterday raised its death toll from Cyclone Nargis 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 on Saturday.

The United Nations' World Food Programme began doling out emergency rice in Yangon and the first batch of more than $10 million worth of foreign aid arrived from Thailand yesterday, but a lack of specialised equipment slowed distribution.

Despite the magnitude of the disaster - the most devastating cyclone to hit Asia since 1991, when 143,000 people died in Bangladesh - France said the ruling generals were still placing too many conditions on aid.

"The United Nations is asking the Burmese government to open its doors. The Burmese government replies: 'Give us money, we'll distribute it'. We can't accept that," Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner told Parliament. Of the dead, only 671 were in the former capital, Yangon, and its outlying districts, state radio said. The rest were all in the vast swamplands of the delta.

"More deaths were caused by the tidal wave than the storm itself," Minister for Relief and Resettlement Maung Maung Swe told a news conference in the rubble-strewn city of five million, where food and water supplies are running low.

"The wave was up to 13.5 metres high and it swept away and inundated half the houses in low-lying villages," he said, giving the first detailed description of the weekend cyclone. "They did not have anywhere to flee."

As many as 10,000 people died in one coastal town alone.

Information Minister Kyaw Hsan said the military were "doing their best", but analysts said there could be fallout for the former Burma's rulers.

"The myth they have projected about being well-prepared has been totally blown away," said analyst Aung Naing Oo, who fled to Thailand after a brutally crushed 1988 uprising. "This could have a tremendous political impact in the long term."

US President George W. Bush urged the regime to accept US disaster experts who have so far have been kept out, and said the US stood ready to "do a lot more" to help.

"The military junta must allow our disaster assessment teams into the country," Mr Bush told reporters, adding he was prepared to make US naval assets available for search and rescue.

Reflecting the scale of the crisis, the junta said it would postpone to May 24 a constitutional referendum in the worst-hit areas of Yangon and the sprawling delta.

However, state TV said the May 10 vote on the charter, part of the army's much-criticised "roadmap to democracy", would proceed as planned in the rest of the southeast Asian nation, which has been under army rule for the last 46 years. Its political plans have been slammed by Western governments, especially after the bloody suppression of protests in September.

The total left homeless is in the several hundred thousands, UN aid officials say.

"There's not much food," one woman at a pineapple stall in Hlaing Tha Yar, an hour's drive west of Yangon, said. "The price of a cabbage is now 1,000 kyats instead of 250."

In Yangon itself, people queued up for bottled water and there was still no electricity four days after the cyclone hit. Prices of food, fuel and construction materials have skyrocketed, and most shops have sold out of candles and batteries. An egg costs three times what it did on Friday.

The disaster drew a rare acceptance of a trickle of outside help from the diplomatically isolated generals, who spurned such approaches in the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

Thailand flew in nine tonnes of food and medicine, the first foreign aid shipment, but a Reuters cameraman on the plane said supplies were unloaded by hand as no forklift trucks were available - a worrying sign of the army's lack of vital kit.

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