Burma

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A year after Cyclone Nargis battered army-ruled Myanmar, killing nearly 140,000 people, paddy fields remain bare and tens of thousands of survivors live in makeshift shelters.

"Everybody lives on food handouts and most of us don't have decent shelter or a job," Ba Thin, 72, said, pointing to the bamboo, thatch and tarpaulin huts lining the road through his village near Bogalay, an area devastated by the May 2-3 storm.

One year since Cyclone Nargis devastated large swathes of southern Myanmar, Oxfam has provided emergency assistance to around half a million people.

$690 million needed to rebuild devastated Delta region.

Hundreds of thousands of people who survived Myanmar's worst-ever cyclone are facing the prospect of being trapped in debt with little prospect of securing further credit or loans and need urgent help from the international community, international aid agency Oxfam said today.

“One of the many impacts of Cyclone Nargis was that it destroyed almost an entire harvest that farmers and fishermen had already borrowed against before the cyclone hit,” Oxfam Myanmar Country Director Claire Light said.