DEDAYE (MYANMAR) - MYANMAR police are trying to clear the roads of thousands of cyclone survivors begging for food from passing cars.

With little official aid reaching the hardest-hit parts of the Irrawaddy Delta, volunteers from Yangon and other cities have been driving to villages to deliver aid themselves.

Less than half of the 2.4 million cyclone victims have received any official aid, according to the United Nations, forcing many to survive on handouts from these volunteers.

Now police are warning volunteers against making donations, threatening to suspend their driving licences.

'Aid goods should be given out at relief centres only,' one officer told a volunteer trying to give food to cyclone victims.

'The people should learn to feed themselves. They should return to their homes,' the officer said. 'We do not want foreigners to think we are a country of beggars.

'Your driving licence will be suspended for one year if you are caught giving out food,' he warned, jotting down the number plate and the volunteer's ID number.

Local military officials are distributing leaflets urging volunteers to stop giving food on the roadside, claiming that 'some of the children and the adults are not victims of the cyclone'.

'We encourage them to directly contact the authorities in places where refugee camps have been set up,' it said, in order to avoid 'arousing the scorn of tourists' and undermining 'the dignity of the Myanmar people'.

Still, hundreds stampede after every passing car, hoping to grab even the scraps.

'Give me something. Give me the rice,' a barefoot five-year-old boy screamed with his hands stretched out at a passing car.

Along the road leading to Dedaye, thousands of people - breastfeeding mothers, children, elderly men and women - wait under the tropical sun and daily monsoon showers, hoping for someone to give them food or clean water.

One AFP reporter said that during a seven-hour journey to Dedaye from Yangon, no government or military officials were seen giving food, medicine or other aid.

Heavy military trucks passed on the road, but did not seem to stop anywhere.

A field hospital was set up outside Dedaye, with 40 neat black and grey tents set up in a football field - but with no patients.

'It is a showpiece centre,' one resident said.

In the nearby town of Kungyangon, a local hospital was being given a fresh coat of paint.

It looked empty too.

'It will take months for the situation to return to normal. Before the cyclone, you did not see these large groups of people begging for food,' one volunteer told AFP.

'Their houses have been destroyed, their rice lost in the storm and they have nothing to wear except what is on them,' the volunteer said.

'Also, after the storm, many can't find a job. Businesses have no more money to employ them,' he said.

'It is not that they like to come out and beg.'

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE