Emergency assistance to Asian communities affected by the tsunami disaster will be needed for at least six months, the United Nations has said, warning that a full recovery would take far longer.
The UN children's fund (UNICEF) East Asia director, Anupama Rao Singh, said the immediate concern was to keep victims alive and to rebuild infrastructure such as schools and health centres.
"In terms of immediate recovery it will take six to nine months minimum," Singh told reporters at a joint event with the UN's World Food Program, which warned it could take six months to reach all two million people in need of food aid.
Malnutrition and disease leading to further deaths are the biggest concern for the United Nations in the coming months, Singh said. Full social and economic recovery in tsunami-affected communities could take much longer, she said. "We are looking at a minimum of two to three years, if not longer depending on the scale [of destruction]," she said, adding that at least one million children had been affected by the crisis.
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan previously said the rebuilding effort could take up to 10 years, while World Vision Australia chief executive Tim Costello said reconstruction would take a generation.
The number of people killed in the disaster edged up towards 146,000 Wednesday, with bodies still being found on the Indian Ocean's devastated shorelines 10 days after the catastrophe.
The WFP said it was focussing its immediate energies on getting emergency food aid to the estimated two million tsunami survivors who urgently need it.
"The challenges are immense and unprecedented in terms of the need for a response," the WFP's Asia director, Anthony Banbury, told reporters. "The total expected needs for our work are 250 million dollars for the next six months," he said adding only 65 million dollars would be spent on food with the remainder of the money needed to deliver it.
Banbury said he expected the money would be pledged at a donors meeting to be held Thursday in Geneva.
More than 900,000 tonnes of food aid has already been distributed to almost half a million people, he said, with Indonesia topping the priority list. "The biggest operational challenge right now is in northern Sumatra and Western Sumatra," he said.
He said Banda Aceh in northern Sumatra had become the hub of an unprecedented global humanitarian mission to help survivors of the December 26 catastrophe that killed more than 94,000 Indonesians.
UN operations are being coordinated out of Bangkok, but Banbury said talks were underway with an unnamed regional government to use a military base as a large-scale logistical hub, which would enable rapid aid delivery throughout the region.