"There is a need for almost everything right now," said Oxfam program director Charlie Rowley. "It's food, very clearly. The hygiene situation is appalling. There is enormous overcrowding in the shelters," he said.

A senior Haitian health official said that without clean water there was a growing risk of epidemic and that the elderly and young were especially vulnerable without food.

Haiti is one of the world's poorest countries, but the three storms that hit the country in the past few weeks, Hurricanes Gustav and Ike and particularly Tropical Storm Hanna, have provoked a national crisis, damaging infrastructure and flattening crops.

"In the next two months, the situation will become more and more acute," ActionAid country director Raphael Yves Pierre said. "The risk of food riots is very imminent."

Ad Melkert, associate administrator of the U.N. Development Program who just returned from Haiti in early September 2008 admonished international donors to do more. "The poverty in the rain and mud of Haiti that I witnessed is nothing less than a disgrace," he said

Haiti is particularly vulnerable to devastating floods because of its steep hillsides that have been deforested to plant crops or make charcoal.