"I'm trying to get to what the bottlenecks are, part of it is just shipping the volume of food in here that is necessary," Clinton told reporters as he visited a clinic in the ruined capital of Port-au-Prince.

He said the other problem was the distances between the 16 main distribution centers in the country. "Look how many people need food, a million? More?" he asked.

Clinton's arrival here comes amid persistent problems in getting aid to the estimated one million Haitians left homeless after the January 12 quake, which killed 212,000 people.

But asked about the persistent delays, Clinton said the government and international community had faced a massive challenge.

"The country's leadership had its offices destroyed ... All the ministers, thank God, survived but they lost a lot of their family members and they lost a lot of their senior aides," he said.

"And the UN leadership, which had to take the lead in this, lost its leader, its deputy and the largest loss of life in the history of the UN. So the structure that would respond to this ordinarily was terribly damaged."

Clinton was designated on Wednesday as coordinator of international aid for the impoverished Caribbean nation by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

Asked why the global aid effort launched in the wake of the 7.0-magnitude quake would prove more successful than past attempts to help the impoverished Caribbean nation, Clinton said things have changed.

"Haiti is different, the leaders are different and they have a commitment to building the country they want to become now, not just rebuilding what they were."

He voiced hopes that out of the ruins better things could emerge for the future of Haiti such as "the first national health system, that is what I think is going to come out of this.

"I think we are going to wind up with a health service better than the one we had and we can do it in a lot of cost efficient ways."

Clinton, however, told reporters that his mission did not involve working for the release of 10 Americans detained on charges of child abduction and conspiracy after trying to take 33 children out of the country.

"That's not within my mandate. I know that the State Department and government have had these discussions," he said.

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