Hunger stalks survivors of the tsunami in outlying villages of Indonesia, the United Nations said, as the death toll from the Indian Ocean disaster soared above 226,000. In a seaside town on the coast of Indonesia’s northern Sumatra island that lay directly in the path of the Dec. 26 wave, prayers rang out at sunrise yesterday for the first time since the disaster from a mosque pockmarked with holes from the force of the wave. Street stalls in Banda Aceh, capital of hardest-hit Aceh province on Sumatra’s northern tip, bustled as shopkeepers sold pineapples, tomatoes, bright red chilies, purple scallions and sides of meat for a major Muslim festival at the end of the week. But many elsewhere in the region were not so fortunate.

A United Nations official in Meulaboh, the province’s second city, said emergency aid drops would have to be sharply increased to avoid hunger in outlying areas. Across Aceh’s ravaged west coast, survivors were few and many villages were virtual ghost towns. In others, a mosque was the only building left standing. In Meulaboh, almost sliced in half by the wave, mountains of rubble smoldered and electricity was intermittent. Some shops and markets were busy and food appeared to be available.

But not enough help was reaching people outside major urban areas, said Daniel Augstburger, head of United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Meulaboh. “The French are starting to move food, of course the Americans ... are moving food out, but this has to increase ten-fold,” Augstburger told Reuters, adding that tsunami victims also needed items such as clothes and cooking utensils. American volunteer nurse Linley York said she had heard reports from an Indonesia working with her that people in a camp in the village of Beurawang to the north were eating leaves.

If that hunger results in starvation and disease it could further swell the staggering death toll from the tsunami triggered by a magnitude 9 earthquake in the sea off Sumatra. Indonesia’s Health Ministry on Wednesday confirmed the deaths of tens of thousands of people previously listed as missing, raising the country’s death toll to 166,320. It had previously given a figure of 95,450 while the Ministry of Social Affairs put the death toll at around 115,000 before it stopped counting. The new figure lifted the total global death toll from the tsunami disaster to 226,566, although the number continues to rise as more deaths are reported around the region.

<B>Jerry Norton and Karima ANJANI</B>