Warehouses Full, but Bangladeshis Get Little Aid : Disaster: Food distribution to victims is haphazard. A tornado brings new woes.

Government warehouses are filled with 800,000 tons of rice and wheat, but planes and helicopters have delivered only 141 tons of desperately needed relief supplies since last week’s cyclone left millions without food, clean water or shelter, military officials said Tuesday.

Even worse, up to 40% of supplies dropped from planes have fallen in the water or smashed on the ground, the officials said. Future supplies will be dropped with parachutes, they said, although it was unclear if the military in fact had any parachutes to use.

Already reeling from the April 30 cyclone, which left at least 125,000 dead, Bangladesh suffered a fresh tragedy Tuesday when a tornado ripped through the industrial town of Chhaydana, 22 miles north of Dhaka, killing at least 25 people and injuring more than 200, officials said.

The emergency airlift is the best hope of helping people marooned in remote villages and half-submerged islands. Food shortages are worsening, relief officials said, and cholera and typhoid epidemics are increasingly feared.

In its first written accounting of the storm’s damage, the government formally requested $665 million in foreign aid for emergency relief and $735 million for reconstruction of infrastructure.

About $150 million in cash and supplies has been pledged by 20 countries so far, according to the Foreign Ministry. Nine planes carrying emergency supplies have arrived from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the U.N. Children’s Fund. Three more planeloads were due from India and Switzerland.

The detailed list was prepared after frustrated diplomats complained that government disorganization was hampering relief efforts. Several countries were issued identical requests for drugs, for example, and many said the government did not need the 200,000 tons of food it requested.

“It’s absolutely irresponsible for them to ask for 200,000 tons,” said a senior Western diplomat. “Food isn’t the problem. It’s distribution.”

Special U.N. envoy Hamed Essafi said the donor countries agreed at a meeting here Tuesday to replenish Bangladesh’s food stocks rather than try to import enough now for the emergency. In exchange, the government agreed to draw down its own grain reserves.

Essafi said “massive external assistance” was required, however, including trucks, landing craft and 20 helicopters.

Eight days after the deadly cyclone and giant tidal surge, government relief efforts remain badly bogged down by bureaucratic delays, bad weather, scarce resources and poor coordination.

But in a bizarre news conference, Prime Minister Khaleda Zia said that the “relief operation is going on in full swing in all areas, including the islands.”

“Relief has been rich to the people, even in areas inaccessible at first,” she said. Her government was “constantly in touch” with the stricken areas, she added, even though most communications facilities were destroyed.

After reporters repeatedly questioned her statements, Zia cut the session short and stormed out of the room with an angry face.

It was Zia’s first press conference since she assumed office on March 19 after the first free multi-party election in Bangladesh’s 20-year history. A shy homemaker who entered politics in 1983 after her husband, former President Ziaur Rahman, was assassinated, she replaced the now-jailed military dictator Hussain Mohammed Ershad after a popular uprising.

In Washington, a U.S. relief expert told members of Congress that as many as 400,000 more people could die in Bangladesh’s flooded coastal region if food and supplies fail to reach them quickly.

Thomas W. Drahman, regional director for Asia of CARE International in New York, said an estimated 4 million people living along the coast have “nothing but the rags on their backs.”

“At least 10% could die if no aid comes soon,” Drahman told members of the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Asia.

Subcommittee Chairman Stephen J. Solarz (D-N.Y.) said he plans to request a $50-million emergency grant to be included in a supplemental foreign aid appropriation designed to assist refugees from the Persian Gulf War.

Bangladesh’s ambassador to the United States, A. H. S. Ataul Karim, said the official death toll was 125,730 but he agreed with Solarz that the number could reach 200,000. He said damage has been estimated at $1.5 billion.

The government’s relief operation--or lack of one--has drawn attention. Brig. Gen. Musa Bhuiyan, head of the president’s disaster relief office, conceded that no supplies were dropped to the worst-hit islands until Thursday and that “30% to 40% of the food has been wasted.”

Times staff writer Don Shannon in Washington contributed to this story.