Last December's gigantic walls of water, which slammed into 11 Indian Ocean nations leaving 220,000 people dead or missing, also wiped out about a million jobs, UN labour agency figures cited in the report showed.

Unprecedented humanitarian aid flowed in the wake of the catastrophe and while the immediate emergency effort has been hailed for preventing many more potential deaths, critics have charged that overall recovery has been slow.

According to the Oxfam report, unemployment in Indonesia's worst-hit Aceh province rose from about 6.8 percent to one in three people while in Sri Lanka the rate in affected areas jumped from 9.2 percent to more than 20 percent.

Among those worst affected were fishing families, small-scale agriculturalists, labourers, people running small businesses and those working in the tourism sector, it said.

Many survivors were already living in poverty, "and many of the underlying reasons that kept so many in poverty in the first place have still to be addressed," the report warned.

In Aceh, nearly three decades of separatist conflict had left a scarred population where the poverty rate had doubled from 14.7 percent in 1999 to 29.8 percent in 2002. In Sri Lanka, about 45 percent of the population were earning less than two dollars a day before the disaster.

Improving livelihoods, Oxfam warned, "is a long-term process, because there are always many different reasons why people are kept in poverty.

"Overcoming these reasons requires a whole range of activities. These might include retraining, forming community groups, providing equipment, increasing access to markets, advocating for policy changes, and so on."

Nevertheless, the UN labour agency forecasts that 50 to 60 percent of workers will be able to earn a living again by the end of 2005 and that 85 percent of jobs will have been restored by the end of next year.

And economists believe that 70 percent of those dragged into poverty by the tsunami -- 1.4 million people -- will be out of poverty by 2007.

"Crops are now being grown on the land that has been reclaimed and will be ready to harvest within the next few months. In Aceh alone, over 5,000 farmers have begun cultivating their fields once again," the report said.

Experts say that it will still take two to five years before the productivity of moderately affected land is fully restored to pre-tsunami levels, it added.

On another positive note, Oxfam staff "are beginning to see an increase in confidence among people who have resumed their livelihoods, particularly in Sri Lanka and India," the report noted.

Aid agencies meanwhile battled an array of obstacles in working to restore livelihoods beyond the sheer scale of the catastrophe, such as trauma and grief suffered by survivors, conflicts in both Aceh and Sri Lanka and access difficulties brought about by a lack of infrastructure, the report said.

It also said that hundreds of thousands of families still remain in temporary shelter and have no knowledge of where they will eventually live, making it difficult for them to restart work.

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