TRICKLE OF AID
While aid has been trickling into Burma, the U.N.'s World Food Programme (WFP) says it has managed to get rice and beans to just 212,000 of the 750,000 people it thinks are most in need.
Analysts say strong criticism of the Burma junta's reluctance over foreign aid is unlikely from ASEAN's Singapore meeting. ASEAN has a policy of non-interference in the internal affairs of its 10 member states.
"I think everybody has already agreed to engage Burma and this is a very good opportunity to show Burma that everybody is caring," said Clarita Carlos, political science professor at the University of the Philippines.
"By moral persuasion, the foreign ministers can ask Burma to provide the logistical support, the infrastructure because it's a less developed economy, to get this aid flowing."
Burma analysts are making much of the reclusive Than Shwe's first appearance since the disaster in Yangon, the city he deserted in 2005 for a remote new capital 250 miles (390 km) to the north.
State television showed the bespectacled 74-year-old Than Shwe in Yangon on Monday meeting ministers involved in the rescue effort and touring some cyclone-hit areas.
The U.N.'s Ban was likely to land in Yangon on Wednesday evening and travel to the Irrawaddy Delta, his spokeswoman said.
Meanwhile the U.N.'s chief humanitarian officer, John Holmes, began a government tour of the delta on Monday after flying in on Sunday night, officials said.
He is expected to meet Prime Minister Thein Sein on Tuesday and deliver a message from Ban to the generals.
Ban previously proposed a "high-level pledging conference" to deal with the crisis, as well as having a joint coordinator from the United Nations and ASEAN to oversee aid delivery.
In the last 50 years, only two Asian cyclones have exceeded the human toll of Nargis -- a 1970 storm that killed 500,000 people in neighbouring Bangladesh and another that killed 143,000 people in 1991, also in Bangladesh.
At least 232,000 people were killed in December 2004 when a tsunami struck nations bordering the Indian Ocean.
