"It will be unfortunate if the donors do not respond. You can imagine ... then the crisis becomes catastrophic," said Sheila Sisulu, deputy executive director of the WFP, who arrived in Bangladesh on Saturday for a four-day visit.

She told reporters in Dhaka yesterday that unusually serious floods during July and early in August had affected some 30 million people, including two million who were displaced.

"The resourcing situation is severely inadequate, representing only about 20 percent of the identified needs," she said, adding that a lack of funds would delay the WFP's plan to start distributing food among flood victims from September.

Sisulu said essential food items are being secured for distribution to flood victims thanks to some funding support from the United States, Britain, Japan, Canada, Norway, Italy, Luxemburg, the Netherlands and Singapore.

The WFP launched a $74-million emergency operation last month to help five million people affected by floods, a senior official of the U.N. agency said.

Bangladesh was swept this month by its heaviest rainfall in more than 50 years, once more inundating large areas still reeling from the previous floods.

The rains washed away newly-planted crops and hundreds of fish farms and flooded the suburbs of Dhaka, the capital, leaving more than a million people marooned, officials said.

Hundreds of families have fled their homes to shelter with relatives or in makeshift camps. The United Nations warned on Sunday of fears the number of malnourished children in flood-hit areas could rise to one million within six to eight weeks.

Sisulu also visited the southeastern Chittagong Hill Tracts this week, where ethnic conflict raged for a quarter century before officially ending in 1997, though officials say some former rebels are still active, fighting rivals and the army.

She said the people in the Hill Tracts - home to 12 Buddhist tribes and Bengali-speaking settlers who often see each other as enemies - needed humanitarian assistance.

"In these post-conflict settings, we find...things only went from bad to worse," said Sisulu, who visited a WFP project there that assists 15,000 women from the ethnic tribes.

Tribal Shanti Bahini rebels ran an insurgency for autonomy in the 5,500 square miles Chittagong Hill Tracts, on the border with Myanmar and India, until a peace deal in 1997.

The rebellion killed more than 8,500 people, and forced about 70,000 tribals to seek temporary refuge in neighboring India.