Authorities have said they are looking to relocate at least 400,000 – now sheltering in more than 400 sprawling, makeshift camps across the devastated city – in temporary refugee settlements, initially tent villages, outside Port-au-Prince.

"We have to evacuate the streets and relocate the people. That is the most important for us," said communications minister Marie Laurence Jocelyn Lassegue.

Health minister Alex Larsen said a million Haitians had been displaced from their homes in the Port-au-Prince area.

The government had tents for 400,000 to be used in the new, temporary settlements, but would need more.

"I'm not sure what you'd call it, but it's much more than terrible," said Anthony, the 60-year-old owner of a collapsed restaurant. Thousands of people were camped around him yesterday across from the National Palace, amid piles of rubbish and the stench of human waste.

"We live like dogs," said Espiegle Amilcar, an unemployed 34-year-old who has been living under a sheet of plastic.

Almost daily aftershocks have shaken the shattered coastal capital since the quake on 12 January that killed up to 200,000, raising the possibility that the city might eventually have to be rebuilt in a safer location.

Nearly two weeks after the magnitude 7 earthquake demolished large swathes of Port-au-Prince and other Haitian cities, a huge United States-led international relief operation is struggling to feed, house and care for hundreds of thousands of homeless survivors, many of them injured.

Facing persistent complaints by desperate survivors that tonnes of aid flown in was not reaching them on the ground, US troops, UN peacekeepers and aid workers have widened and intensified the distribution of food and water. "If you can't fight you can't get anything," said a petite 19-year-old Haitian named Darling, who missed the bags of rice and bottles of cooking oil handed out at a crowded survivors' camp.

The supplies were handed to every fourth person in a queue of about 15,000. Aid agency Plan International's idea was that the Haitians would divide up the rice, or barter it for other supplies. But for many in the makeshift camp it did not work out that way.

"There was no sharing," said one survivor.

In Montreal, Canada, yesterday, a meeting of foreign donors pondered how to move from humanitarian relief to long-term reconstruction of a country that even before the quake was the poorest in the western hemisphere.

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