The European Union urged Burma's military junta today to allow aid and aid workers to the 1.5 million people facing hunger and disease in the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis.
The response of the regime in Burma to this crisis has been absolutely callous, and those paying the price of this callousness have been the long-suffering Burmese people - Kevin Rudd
The statement agreed by EU development ministers at an emergency meeting supported other humanitarian initiatives that could be taken in the United Nations framework.
But it stopped short of endorsing France's call for the world to deliver aid without the reluctant military junta's agreement, diplomats said.
France, Britain and Germany had called for the UN principle of the "responsibility to protect" to be invoked to force aid into Burma if necessary.
The United Nations says more than 1.5 million people are struggling to survive and up to 100,000 are dead or missing after cyclone Nargis hit.
UN spokeswoman Elisabeth Byrs said: "We need a kind of air bridge or sea bridge, and huge means (just) as the aid delivery we did in the tsunami."
In Burma, heavy rains today pelted homeless survivors in the Irrawaddy delta hampering the already slow delivery of aid.
Burma state television said the official death toll from Cyclone Nargis had risen to 34,273 from nearly 32,000 and that 27,838 were missing.
"The response of the regime in Burma to this crisis has been absolutely callous, and those paying the price of this callousness have been the long-suffering Burmese people," Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd told parliament.
An Australian air force plane landed in Rangoon, Burma’s main city, with 31 tonnes of emergency supplies, a day after the first US military aid flight arrived in the country.
Two more US flights arrived today as part of a "confidence building" effort to prod Burma’s reclusive generals into allowing a larger international relief operation 11 days after the disaster left up to 100,000 dead or missing.
Tens of thousands of people throughout the Irrawaddy delta are crammed into Buddhist monasteries and schools after arriving in towns. Lacking food, water and sanitation, they face the threat of killer diseases such as cholera.
Although a steady stream of aid flights have landed in Rangoon, only a fraction of the relief needed is getting to the delta due to flooding and the junta's desire to keep most foreign aid and logistics experts either out of the country or in Rangoon.
The World Food Programme said it was able to deliver less than 20 per cent of the 375 tonnes of food a day it wanted to move into the flooded delta.
The junta has welcomed "aid from any nation" but has made it very clear it does not want outsiders distributing it.
The storm raged through an area home to nearly half of Burma’s 53 million people, as well as its main rice-growing region. About 5,000sq km of land remain under water.
Most of the casualties were killed by a 12-foot wall of water churned up by the cyclone's 190kph winds.