Tents are a priority item with around three million people made homeless, many of them forced to live in the open in plummeting temperatures in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir and parts of North West Frontier Province.

"It is fair to say the indication is that there are not enough tents in the world available to support the requirements," Andrew MacLeod, chief operations officer in the UN emergency response centre in Islamabad, told AFP.

Pakistan on Tuesday banned all exports of tents, a day after it said it would even buy tents from its rival India.

The UN has said it had already exhausted the supply of the vital items in Pakistan, which is itself the world's biggest producer of so-called winterized tents.

"If there is another emergency in the next few months (elsewhere in the world) it will be very difficult. So that is a huge issue right now," UN spokeswoman Amanda Pitt said.

Pitt said it was impossible to give a definitive figure on how many tents were needed, but said authorities were working on a homeless figure of between 2.8 and 3.2 million, with an average of five members per family.

Around 37,000 tents had been delivered as of Monday night, the Pakistani government has contributed a further 100,000 and another 150,000 were "in the pipeline but still we believe that it is not going to be enough," she said.

Relief agencies were scrambling to find warm tents from wherever they could before snows begin to fall on the devastated mountain villages of Kashmir and northern Pakistan, the spokeswoman said.

"We are trying to get them from everywhere. Neighbouring countries are key ... and China, Korea, Singapore, the Middle East, everywhere," Pitt said.

Pakistan's disaster response chief, Major General Farooq Ahmad Khan, said Tuesday the country had banned the export of tents as it needed as much makeshift shelter as possible.

Khan said there were 37 tent-making factories in Punjab, the richest and most populous of Pakistan's four provinces, capable of producing 75,000 tents a day, but that he was not sure all were appropriate for the Himalayan winter.

Pakistan also appealed for bigger tents to use as temporary schools in the coming months. Hundreds of schools collapsed in the quake, killing thousands of children.

Officials have said the disaster, in which at least 41,000 people died in Pakistan and 1,300 in India, was worse than the 2004 Asian tsunami because of the difficult terrain and the inhospitable climate.

Helicopters, trucks and donkeys have struggled to get enough tents, blankets and food to cold and hungry survivors since the 7.6-magnitude quake.

"The whole thing here is a nightmare. I know it sounds dramatic to say this but it really is a case of nature overwhelming man," Pitt said.

"It is just phenomenal, there are whole villages that are not accessible at the best of times. Getting supplies into them is a superhuman effort," she said.

Pakistan's foreign ministry said Monday it was importing tents from rival India on an urgent basis. India has already sent three consignments of aid, the latest of which arrived by train on Monday.

related report
Half A Million In Desperate Need After Pakistan Quake: WFP
Islamabad (AFP) Oct 18 -- Half a million survivors of Pakistan's earthquake are in "desperate need" of shelter, blankets, medical care and food with time running out to save them, the World Food Programme (WFP) said Tuesday.

James Morris, executive director of the United Nations agency, said that reaching the isolated victims of the October 8 earthquake in the Himalayas was one of the toughest aid missions ever.

"The aid agencies have managed to give some help to hundreds of thousands of people, but there are an estimated half a million more people out there in desperate need who no one has managed to reach," Morris said in a statement.

"People don't just need food -- first of all they need shelter, blankets and medical assistance -- then food and clean water," Morris added.

The WFP said half a million people had received enough food for several days but that "time was running out" with winter approaching.

"At the best of times this is very difficult terrain, but with landslides blocking roads, plus the onset of winter, getting to these people is taking far longer. And there is very little time left," Morris said.

Pakistan says the October 8 earthquake measuring 7.6 on the Richter scale killed more than 41,000 people and left 3.3 million others homeless.

Pakistan has been urgently importing tents, fearing that the country is critically short of shelter ahead of the Himalayan winter.

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