Some North Koreans are resorting to cannibalism in a desperate bid to survive their nation's famine, according to a refugee and others interviewed by aid workers in neighbouring China. In China, a 23-year-old refugee said he saw his neighbours eat their daughter, according to representatives from the French charity Medecins Sans Frontieres. A Chinese-Korean who sometimes crosses the border to take food and other essentials to his former hometown in North Korea claimed one woman ate her two-year-old child to stave off hunger. They also quoted the director of an orphanage in the Chinese border town of Yanji as saying she met an 18-year-old North Korean refugee who said her neighbour killed, salted and ate an abandoned orphan.
There have been other persistent but unconfirmed reports of cannibalism in famine stricken North Korea. The communist state's food shortages stem from economic mismanagement and natural disasters in the past three years that devastated crops.
Mr Marcel Roux, one of the French aid workers who spent just over a week interviewing people along the border with North Korea, said reports of cannibalism could not be proved because the North's secretive government is hiding the truth from foreign aid agencies.
"Nobody can prove anything in North Korea today because no one has access to reality, with the exception of those who flee the country," he said yesterday. "We, for instance, are shown a few sick people or malnutrition cases: just what is needed to justify aid."
In their report, the aid workers quoted an academic in the Chinese border town of Tumen as saying that cousins of his in North Korea were given a grain ration last year but ordered not to touch it. After foreigners visited to inspect that the grain had been distributed, government officials took the sacks of grain away again, the academic claimed.
However, the difficulty in obtaining reliable information on starvation levels was highlighted by a report from a senior official from the UN's food aid agency in Rome yesterday. Ms Judy Cheng-Hopkins the World Food Programme (WFP) Director for Asia and the Commonwealth of Independent States, said she could not confirm reports that three million people had starved to death since 1995, but neither could she dismiss them.
Ms Cheng-Hopkins, said estimates of three million deaths "point to a very grave situation that the international community has to pay attention to. I think we cannot afford to have another quiet famine hit us again this century".
"I wouldn't dismiss them [the estimates] but I would say that, when you interview a sample of self-selecting people who cross the border (to China) and then extrapolate them to the rest of the population to come up with a final figure, I don't know . . . how sound that is," Ms Cheng-Hopkins said.
"That is not to downplay the extent of the emergency that we have before us. People stress numbers to get your attention . . . to something that is an emergency," she added.
Ms Cheng-Hopkins, who visited North Korea from April 7th to April 11th said the country had been one million tonnes short of food for each of the last two years.
"The worst isn't over and I think no matter how optimistic the prognosis, there is going to be a food deficit again next year, and possibly the year after that," she said. But she was careful to stress the differences with famines in Ethiopia and Somalia, involving "masses of humanity walking across deserts, all skin and bone".
AFP adds: High-level inter-Korean talks ground to a halt in Beijing yesterday as both sides waited for the other to make concessions and break a stalemate in the first direct negotiations in four years.
"We have made all concessions we could make. There are no more things we could give the Southern side," said Mr Ri Sung-Duk of the Northern delegation. The delegation from Seoul has made it clear they first want a concrete pledge from Pyongyang to help with reuniting families torn apart by the four-decade division of the Korean peninsula before shipping aid.