NORTH KOREA: The UN food agency has run out of rice and grain to feed a population already suffering from malnutrition, writes Clifford Coonan
North Korean orphanages have cut back to two meals a day from three because the United Nations food agency has run out of rice and grain to feed 6.5 million people in the secretive Stalinist state.
"We are talking of a total cutback. In the dead of winter this is the worst time to run out," said Mr Masood Hyder, the World Food Programme's representative in North Korea.
Around a quarter of North Korea's population, including millions of children, pregnant women and old people, face going hungry until the end of March, when emergency grain shipments from Russia and the United States arrive.
The WFP has urged donor nations to put aside political concerns over the country's nuclear weapons programme and concentrate on the humanitarian plight of ordinary North Koreans.
The WFP needs nearly half a million tonnes of food for North Korea this year but so far has been promised only 140,000 tonnes.
Mr Hyder and his colleagues gave shocking insights into the daily lives of ordinary people in the Communist state, where temperatures at this time of year can fall to minus 35 degrees.
"In the schools and the kindergartens they have nothing," said spokesman Mr Gerald Bourke, who is spending an extended period based in the capital, Pyongyang.
"I visited one nursery with maybe 25 children in Mundok county, north of the capital in South Phyongan province, and all they were feeding was cabbage soup and some rice from cooperative farms. They had nothing left in stores from the WFP," said Mr Bourke.
"Only one section of one room in the nursery was heated and all the kids, between one and four years of age, were huddled around the heat," said Mr Bourke.
It is widespread practice for hungry North Koreans to eat grass, bracken and leaves, he said, but even this diet of last resort was not an option until spring came in April.
Mr Hyder said that despite the short-term deprivations, people were not expected to die. But the long-term impact of hunger was devastating.
"There will be, firstly, a real increase in suffering. Pregnant women will give birth to low birth-weight babies, passing on an inheritance of hunger. Nurseries will cut back to two meals a day, and some have already done that," Mr Hyder said.
"I visited the home of a woman expecting a baby. I thought she was perhaps three or four months pregnant. I was assured that she was full term, about to give birth. It was quite a dramatic situation, I was quite shocked."
While pregnant women normally gain around 10 kilos during pregnancy, the woman in this case had gained just five kilos.
In parts of the country, food is so scarce that fields are guarded.
North Korea maintains a cult around its leader, Kim Jong Il, the Dear Leader, who took over after his father Kim Il Sung, the Great Leader, died in 1994.
Adding to its food production woes, North Korea is plagued with energy shortages and electricity supplies have fallen to around one quarter of what they were in 1989.
"You need an assured energy supply for the threshing machines to work. If you don't have that you increase the supply of spoilage. And without electricity you can't make fertiliser," Mr Hyder said.
Donor nations, particularly the world's richest country, the United States, suspect that food aid is diverted away from the needy to the country's 1.1 million-member military though Mr Hyder said he saw no evidence that this was happening.
"The government is doing its best to supply a basic ration. At the moment that's around 300 grams of cereal a day, which is exactly half of what a person needs to survive," Mr Hyder said.
Diplomats from six countries are due to meet in the Chinese capital Beijing at the end of this month to discuss the North Korean nuclear crisis.
Mr Hyder said he hoped the talks would improve the political atmosphere and ease tensions between Pyongyang and Washington.
Japan, which was once a key donor, has also withheld aid because it says Pyongyang has yet to clarify the kidnapping of Japanese nationals in the 1970s and 1980s.
"As the political context improves, certainly the possibility of a more generous response might be effected," said Mr Hyder.
North Korea has depended on foreign food aid since it confessed in the mid-1990s that its state-run farming industry had collapsed after decades of mismanagement and the loss of subsidies following the collapse of its main patron, the Soviet Union.
Surveys by various UN agencies show that 42 per cent of North Korean children are suffering from chronic malnutrition or stunting, while one third of mothers surveyed were malnourished and anaemic.