The first plane-load of emergency food and medicine has arrived in Haiti, three days after President Jean-Bertrand Aristide fled into exile and US and French forces landed to restore calm after a month-long revolt.
The United Nations children's fund, UNICEF, delivered a DC-8 carrying 30 tonnes of medicines, water and sanitation equipment arrived in the decrepit capital. Workers unloaded cargo that included obstetric and infant supplies for 30,000 women and children, the group said.
"The thing we most urgently need is access to the people. We need everyone to work to improve security," said Francoise Gruloos Ackerman, a UNICEF worker.
As aid agencies warned that already dire humanitarian needs in the poorest country of the Americas now verged on a crisis, missionaries and aid workers who had fled to escape fighting prepared to ramp up relief efforts.
"It's not an exaggeration to say (the humanitarian situation) has to be horrendous," said Ken Boodhoo, an international relations expert at Florida International University, who also runs an aid agency, Whole Man Ministries.
Warehouses that stored emergency food for the UN's World Food Programme before the rebels took over a swath of Haiti's north were looted in the mayhem as ill-equipped police were driven out by armed gangs, demobilised soldiers and former militia leaders.
That food would have fed hundreds of thousands in a country where a third of the 8 million people suffer from chronic malnutrition and incomes average just a dollar a day.
International charity Oxfam said conditions were particularly grave in Port de Paix, in the remote northwest where at least 80,000 people were threatened by disease because they had no clean water.
The first aid deliveries are unlikely to be widely distributed in the provinces.
British-based relief agency ActionAid International said a prime concern was to help Haitian farmers plant seed for the next crop. The plantings were disrupted by the revolt.
"It's very day to day at the moment and we're really just assessing the situation as it develops," said spokeswoman Alice Wynne Willson.