The United Nations warned yesterday that food shortages in North Korea will worsen this year due to a poor harvest and a disastrous winter.
The UN Humanitarian Co-ordinator, Mr David Morton, said the 2000 harvest was 1.8 million tonnes short of the 4.8 million tonnes needed to feed North Korea's 22 million people.
North Korea has been plagued by food shortages since floods and droughts hit the country in the mid 1990s. It has been dependent on foreign aid since then.
Mr Morton warned that malnutrition among children was "easy to find" in the country, with a majority underweight and undersized.
He told a news conference in Beijing that state food distribution pipelines had mostly dried up in January, five months earlier than last year. He said he expected the shortages to impact on the people from now until the next harvest in October-November.
The UN World Food Programme (WFP) is feeding about eight million North Koreans, including six million children.
However, the overall condition of children had improved as the result of years of aid being targeted at the young through schools.
Those who were not getting aid - particularly adults, miners, factory workers and residents of eastern coastal cities - would bear the brunt of the shortfalls, he predicted.
Mr Morton said the consensus is that aid is generally reaching the people, despite stiff government controls on foreign aid workers that kept 44 of North Korea's 211 counties off limits to monitoring.
He said the diplomatic thaw which saw North Korea normalise ties with New Zealand and many European countries had probably contributed to greater aid flows, notably from Japan and from South Korea.
Mr Morton said he hoped US aid would continue. The US has always separated humanitarian needs from political considerations.
The US government accounted for more than 52 per cent of the cash and more than 55 per cent of the grain contributed to WFP operations in North Korea between July, 1999, and December, 2000.
About 60,000 people in a province of Vietnam's troubled Central Highlands are facing hunger ahead of the harvest of their next rice crop, an official newspaper reported yesterday.
--(Reuters)