Maungaye, a Burmese farmer in the village of Thilamyaing near the Irrawaddy delta, plunges his arm into a huge wicker basket of rice that is beginning to sprout and turn mouldy. “It's so hot, you could cook an egg on it,” he says, shaking his head sadly.

Before cyclone Nargis he was a relatively wealthy farmer, with 100 baskets of rice that he had grown on more than eight acres of paddy fields. Now, he gestures across his soggy land where two of his three oxen drowned and he lost manure and pesticides as well as all his seeds for the coming planting season.