LONDON: Thousands of children in Myanmar could die of starvation within two or three weeks, a charity said yesterday.

Save the Children UK said its research showed that an estimated 30,000 children under five in Myanmar's Irrawaddy Delta were already acutely malnourished when Cyclone Nargis tore through the region and that several thousand among them are now at risk of death.

"With hundreds of thousands of people still not receiving aid, many of these children will not survive much longer.

"Children may already be dying as a result of a lack of food," it said.

Humanitarian aid agency Action Against Hunger said the price of rice had quadrupled since the cyclone struck the country.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon will travel to Myanmar this week to discuss the troubled aid operations for victims of the cyclone.

The UN's top disaster official John Holmes arrived in Myanmar yesterday on a three-day visit to convince the reluctant regime to open the doors to a massive relief effort.

Holmes was carrying a letter from the secretary general to the head of the junta, Than Shwe, shortly before the latter made his first visit to an area hit by the cyclone.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa and French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner have both raised the spectre of crimes against humanity by the junta over its handling of the catastrophe.

Tutu said the regime had "effectively declared war on its own population."

l Raw footages of the death and destruction caused by the cyclone are a big hit in the country.

Images of bloated bodies and flattened villages have been broadcast around the world since the cyclone, but inside Myanmar they are available only on the black market.

Myanmar's military junta does not want its people to see the full devastation caused by the storm.