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<span style="font-weight: bold">Some adopted children have already arrived in the Netherlands </span>
The <span style="font-weight: bold">US </span>and the Netherlands are aiming to speed up the process to allow dozens of Haitian orphans to join adoptive families as quickly as possible.
The children had adoptions pending before last week's earthquake but there are fears that in many adoption cases vital paperwork will have been lost.
Orphanages are among the many buildings wrecked or damaged by the quake.
Children's advocacy groups have warned against starting new adoption processes in the midst of an emergency.
Several Haitian children adopted by Dutch families arrived in the Netherlands on Sunday and officials said a plane had been chartered to collect about 100 others.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told CNN she was "personally directing that we do everything we can to try to find and identify those children who are already adoptable... and to try to expedite all the paperwork... to get them to their new home."
The US state department has stressed that it can only aim to expedite those adoptions that were already completed by the Haitian government.
"We obviously want to be able to bring these children to safety, but there are issues - there are complexities in terms of what their status is in Haiti, and there's a legal process that we have to work through," spokesman PJ Crowley said.
The US authorities are encouraging US families with pending adoptions to contact them with information about their case.
Officials believe there are at least 300 cases pending, while advocacy groups say there may be some 900 adoption cases under way for US parents.
Canadian authorities have also indicated that priority consideration in granting immigration visas would be given to pending adoption cases.
It is believed between 1,200 and 1,500 adoption cases are pending for French families, but the French government has said its priority is emergency aid rather than organising the transfer of the children.
"Adoptive families whose procedure in Haiti has been completed and whose child has a Haitian passport can rest assured that they will be brought to France as soon as possible," the French foreign ministry said.
However, some adoptive parents are pressing for more urgent action given the humanitarian situation in Haiti.
Quake toll 'may be 200,000'
They are also concerned that many records, which will often have taken months to finalise, may have been lost amid the earthquake damage.
The Roman Catholic archdiocese in Miami, which has a sizeable Haitian community, has proposed the airlift of hundreds of Haitian children to South Florida, in an echo of the exodus from Cuba in the early 1960 of some 14,000 Cuban youngsters.
However, the Joint Council on International Children's Services, a US advocacy group, says the immediate focus should be on the safety of children in Haiti and getting emergency help to them.
"While both airlifts and new adoptions are based on valid concerns and come from an obviously loving heart, neither option is considered viable by any credible child welfare organisation," the group said.
"<span style="font-weight: bold">Bringing children into the US either by airlift or new adoption during a time of national emergency can open the door for fraud, abuse and trafficking</span>."
Haiti has some 380,000 orphans, the UN's childrens' agency Unicef says, but that number is expected to have increased in the wake of the earthquake.
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