No food aid packages have been distributed in Vanuatu, seven days after Cyclone Pam struck the island nation.
It's understood huge quantities of emergency food and other aid are sitting idle in the Vanuatu Mobile Force barracks in the capital Port Vila.
Local newspaper the Vanuatu Daily Post reports that National Disaster Management Office officials are arguing over the distribution of aid.
Government spokesman Kiery Manassah says the aid is being stalled because islanders are likely to have enough to eat this week, while the food will be needed next week.
He also says the government wants to make sure the needs of all the estimated 67,000 households affected by the savage storm are met equally.
"The government wants transparency, accountability and a fair distribution of relief supplies," Mr Manassah told the Vanuatu Daily Post.
Aid organisations and the UN are poised to distribute huge amounts food and other aid as soon as the NDMO directs them to do so.
Expatriates in Port Vila, who didn't want to be named, are critical of the nation's disaster response, accusing the NDMO of incompetence.
"All that aid is just sitting up there while people are going hungry," an Australian man, who had lived in Vanuatu for more than 15 years, told AAP.
"There's little kids with really bad cuts and stuff from the cyclone that can't even get a bandage at the moment."
He said concerned expats and local businesses had taken it upon themselves to buy bags of rice, flour and other supplies and distribute them to hungry locals.
A New Zealand woman, also a long-term resident, said the NDMO had handed out lengthy disaster surveys to hungry people who didn't even know how to fill them out.
"Some of the questions aren't even related to the cyclone. They're just ridiculous," she told AAP.
She said people desperately needed food.
"They can build shelter again. That's easy," she said.
"In Vanuatu we get earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, cyclones. We're used to disasters. We know how to get things going again.
"This time we have all this help, but seven days later we still don't have the one thing we need - food."
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