There's confusion in Solomon Islands about the extent to which authorities are aware of food shortages in the far eastern province of Temotu.
The national disaster management office says it's completed and sent a report to the government information office, stating that Temotu province faces further severe food shortages as soon as next month.
But the prime minister's spokesman, Johnson Honimae, says his office hasn't received such a report.
The prime minister's office and the national disaster management office each say the other ought to be in a position to comment.
Meanwhile the main hospital in Temotu province has confirmed ongoing food shortages.
An Austrian doctor who's been working at Lata hospital for three years, Gunther Kittel, is managing an outbreak of diarrhoea and dysentery.
But Dr Kittel says patients aren't dying of malnutrition.
"At the moment there is some food shortage in certain places, that's very true, but at least at the moment, due to still-functioning traditional systems whatever... people can help out, so it's not at every place. So at the moment it has not come to the stage that people are suffering that way, that there is kind of a famine or something."
