YANGON, June 4: US warships laden with supplies for Myanmar’s cyclone victims will sail away after the junta refused their help, even as aid workers on Wednesday pleaded for more help to reach about a million survivors.

The US Navy said they would withdraw the four ships --- carrying helicopters, amphibious vehicles and water purifying equipment --- from off the coast after repeated attempts to convince the regime to let them in.

“But they have refused us each and every time. It is time for the USS Essex group to move on to its next mission,” Admiral Timothy Keating, commander of US Pacific Command, said in a statement.

“I am both saddened and frustrated to know that we have been in a position to help ease the suffering of hundreds of thousands of people and help mitigate further loss of life, but have been unable to do so because of the unrelenting position of the Burma military junta,” he added.

Cyclone Nargis left more than 133,000 people dead or missing as it ploughed across the country formally known as Burma about a month ago, laying waste to vital farmlands and wiping villages off the map.

The United Nations estimates that of the 2.4 million survivors in need of food and shelter, 1.1 million have received no foreign aid.

A large number of the survivors are farmers living in the isolated delta area, and the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation warned that many had not planted their new rice crop, raising fears of food shortages.

“Many areas are still empty and farmers haven’t yet come back because of the lack of shelter and lack of food,” the FAO’s deputy regional representative Hiroyuki Konuma told reporters in Bangkok.

“We have to complete sowing by the end of July latest otherwise it will create tremendous damage to productivity and affect income and eventually will affect national security of Myanmar itself.”

For the first three weeks after the storm, the ruling generals stonewalled international efforts to deliver aid, yielding only after UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon paid a personal visit here to meet junta leader Than Shwe.

Foreign relief groups, who struggled for weeks to even get staff into the country, let alone into the worst-hit areas, are seeing small gains but say it is far from enough.

France Hurtubise, a spokeswoman for the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, said six of their foreign staff entered the ravaged Irrawaddy Delta area for the first time on Wednesday.

“For the tsunami we had 300 expats in within the first month —compare 300 to six,” she said, referring to the 2004 disaster which killed 220,000 people around the Indian Ocean.

Aid agencies also complain that staff are only being given permission to travel to the hard-to-reach delta for one week at a time.

The UN’s World Food Programme has said boats and helicopters are now needed to reach survivors in the remotest regions, but the one WFP helicopter in the country was only given permission to leave Yangon on Monday.

Nine more helicopters are sitting on the tarmac in Thai airports. They are due to fly into Myanmar later this week, but it remains unclear if and when they will be allowed into the delta.—AFP