Famine-striken North Korea is heading towards a catastrophe unless it receives more assistance from the international community, senior Red Cross officials said in Seoul yesterday.
"Unless North Korea gets help from outside it is in danger of losing the younger and older generation due to the lack of nutrition," Ms Astrid Heiberg, president of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, said after a three-day visit to North Korea. "My call to the world is to continue support to North Korea to avoid catastrophe," she said.
The Red Cross official, in a stopover in Beijing on Tuesday, said famine in North Korea had spread to government officials, now forced to mix their meagre food rations with grass and bitter acorns.
"The crop will be no better than last year," said Ms Margareta Wahlstrom, the federation's undersecretary-general for disaster relief, who accompanied Ms Heiberg to Pyongyang. "So we are not likely to see an improvement in 1999 in the nutrition situation."
International aid agencies expect the grim situation to continue as the 1998 grain harvest is likely to reach just three million tonnes, or two-thirds of North Korea's minimum need.
Ms Heiberg said the Red Cross planned to raise its aid to North Korea to $9 million next year to double health service activities in the country.
Malnutrition has eased slightly in the past year, but tens of thousands of children are still hungry, and infant and maternal death rates are climbing, according to the UN children's fund representative there.
"The situation is still very serious in many different areas, not only in nutrition, but also with the health system, water and sanitation," according to Mr Runar Sorensen, UNICEF's resident project officer in Pyongyang.
He said UN agencies were joining with the Red Cross in launching appeals for relief programmes for North Korea in December.
Mr Sorensen, in Bangkok for a ministerial meeting on children and development, said a joint assessment by UNICEF and the UN Food and Agricultral Organisation had found there would be "quite a lot of shortfall of food for 1999".
Although he said the number of people suffering malnutrition ran into the tens of thousands he rejected reports of huge numbers of deaths from the famine. "We don't believe in any of these horror stories that have been told in the press that millions of people have died of hunger. UNICEF believes that if this was the situation in the country, it would be reflected in the whole society."