A stark picture of a malnourished North Korean child, which helped generate food aid for the famine-stricken communist country when it appeared in western newspapers, infuriated North Korean officials who felt it portrayed them as starving Africans. The authorities subsequently placed travel restrictions on Ms Hilary Mackenzie, the information officer for the United Nations World Food Programme, who took the photograph during a tour of hospitals, schools and kindergartens. It was published in several US and European newspapers last month, and used in successful appeals for aid for North Korea's children.
One North Korean official angrily denounced Ms Mackenzie for upsetting the parents of the child by taking a picture "which made him look like a starving African". He asked her: "How would you like to see your own children on pin-up posters?"
The official alleged that the parents had seen the picture in the US newspaper USA Today, said Ms Mackenzie, interviewed in Beijing after two months touring World Food Programme (WFP) distribution sites in North Korea. However, no western newspapers are available to the public there.
The rulers of North Korea, the world's last Stalinist country, refuse to admit foreign journalists to report on the food shortages, which have been aggravated by two years of severe flooding and the loss of aid from the former Soviet Union and are extremely sensitive about foreign criticism of their system.
The WFP official took the photograph of the four-year-old malnourished child with prominent rib-cage as he lay in a bed in Singye County People's Hospital south east of the, capital Pyongyang.
"I explained to the official that we have to show donors the conditions in North Korea and that it meant they would get more food aid," said Ms Mackenzie. "They did not accept that. There is also a perception that we were making money from the photograph, though we distributed it without charge."
She said she understood that the impact of the picture was so great that it helped an appeal for famine victims achieve a target of $46 million (£32 million) in a week. The child had been in hospital a month with malnutrition complicated by diarrhoea when the photograph was taken on July 10th. "It was room after room with children like this," Ms Mackenzie said. Hospitals throughout the country no longer have food and are not admitting malnourished children unless they have complications, such as diarrhoea or respiratory infections.
"It's heartbreaking," she said. "You go into nurseries and kindergartens and hospitals and you see kids of five who can't walk because they have oedema, their feet are so swollen. You see children with their skin hanging in folds from their arms and peeling. When I saw classrooms with children listless and vacant, sitting around staring blankly, I was choking back tears."
The North Korean authorities have revised upwards their figure for children malnourished to the first or second degree from 16.6 per cent to 37 per cent, Ms Mackenzie said, but in her experience official statistics were totally unreliable. Children have died from complications due to malnutrition but there is no way of estimating how many.
The World Food Programme is providing aid in the form of high-nutritional foods containing a blend of milk, corn and soy beans to the 2.6 million children in North Korea under the age of six. Its four major donors for North Korea are the EU, US, Australia and Japan.
Ms Mackenzie described circumstances throughout North Korea as "bleak". She quoted Dr Roberto Christen, adviser to the Food and Agriculture Organisation, as saying in Pyongyang that because of drought, "the situation is absolutely disastrous and there is going to be a major catastrophe". After 70 days without rain, an estimated 70 per cent of the 650,000 hectares planted in maize had been lost already and approximately the same acreage planted in rice is threatened.