Two senior Indonesian ministers will today travel to north Sumatra to look at ways of clearing a backlog of hundreds of containers of tsunami relief supplies sitting idle on docks because of bureaucratic and logistical problems.

As of yesterday morning the equivalent of 1,500 20ft containers of aid - almost a third of those that had arrived since the December 26 disaster - remained stuck at the port of Medan, the main hub for supplies heading to Aceh, the hardest hit province.