A terrible famine occurred in China between 1958 and 1962, when at least 30 million people starved to death. Only 10 years ago did American demographers discover by deduction the results of Mao Zedong's utopian engineering and three years of poor harvests.

At a time when people were dying in their millions, the communist government and western visitors assured the world that all was well. The few contemporary reports of China's famine, mainly in the US press, were based largely on the accounts of refugees reaching Hong Kong, and these were ridiculed.

The journalist Jasper Becker in his book, Hungry Ghosts: China's Secret Famine (John Murray, 1996), describes how the tragedy was kept hidden from the world. There were 350 foreigners living in Beijing but their travel was restricted, and correspondents were not given visas if they could speak Chinese. They had to do all their work through official interpreters.

One of the few Americans allowed into the country, journalist Edgar Snow, was taken on a five-month tour of communes and factories and wrote that he saw no starving people. He was not alone. Others to be given Potemkinlike tours included Francois Mitterrand in 1961, who said he believed Mao that "the people of China have never been near famine". Even 10 years after the disaster, an authority on Chinese agriculture, Dwight H. Perkins, concluded that "tight control, particularly an effective system of rationing . . . averted a major disaster" in 1958-1962.

This was not the first time that a totalitarian regime had deluded the world about a great man-made calamity. Reports of famine in Ukraine during Stalin's forced collectivisation of the 1930s, when between five and eight million people died from hunger, were denied by Russia and dismissed by such authorities as the New York Times Moscow correspondent, Walter Durante, and the British social reformers, Beatrice and Sidney Webb. They joined organised visits to collective farms and then poured scorn on those who said there was famine. Is history now repeating itself?

The Democratic People's Republic of Korea is suffering severe food shortages. The government in Pyongyang has admitted that 137 people died from hunger in the country in 1996. A North Korean diplomat, Ri Thae Gyun, said in Dublin last July, "People are now dying because of lack of food."

But Korea denies there is a famine, and there is deep disagreement in the world community about how serious things are. Some experts say famine has been averted in the communist country thanks to international food aid, and that there is no evidence of widespread deaths as a result of shortages. Others say there is a famine occurring in which more than two million people may have died, and that it is being hidden from the world. In the lexicon of their debate, the word "famine", defined in dictionaries as an extreme and general scarcity of food, has come to mean starvation and multiple deaths.

The focus for news from North Korea is Beijing, the nearest city with flights to the North Korean capital. International aid workers use Beijing as a staging and recreational post, passing on to journalists their assessments of the situation as they come and go. Foreign aid workers live mainly in a diplomatic compound in Pyongyang, or travel frequently in and out of the country.

Kathi Zellweger of the Catholic charity, Caritas, has been visiting North Korea for several years. She noted in a report in August last year that there is a significant difference from the famine in China of 1958-1962. Unlike China under Mao, the North Korean government has revealed its problems and requested international assistance. But conditions are similar to China, she believes, in that North Korea has one of the world's "most reclusive regimes".

There are other similarities to China four decades ago. Aid workers say that visas are refused to Korean-speakers. All visits to schools or orphanages or distribution centres by aid workers are monitored. No contact with anyone local is permitted without a government official.

The one or two foreign correspondents allowed into North Korea in the past year were put under similar restraints. Foreigners are not allowed to disembark from trains. One humanitarian worker set out on the eight-hour train journey from Pyongyang to Hamhung and was confined to his compartment for eight days as it sat idle due to power cuts.

Just as in China 40 years ago, there is praise from the resident foreign community for the tight control of distribution and an apparently efficient system of rationing.

In a report last November the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation stated that "a well-functioning public administration and an elaborate public food distribution network greatly facilitate the distribution and accounting of food assistance". World Vision, a private US-based organisation with evangelical roots, says it is confident its aid has been distributed properly.

Almost all the many Pyongyang-based aid workers I have spoken to comment on the devotion of the North Korean people to their system. Some get quite close to their "minders" and admire the pride and stoicism of the people.

Veterans of famines in Africa point out that they see no evidence of the looting and extortion they are used to. However, one said bluntly that the international community knew very little about what was going on.

"People sit around a table and speculate," he stated in a private report. "They think they are monitoring but the authorities have 24-48 hours' notice . . . I believe that if four million people were to die this year we would not know about it. After a while here you begin to doubt what might be true and believe what might be false."

Aid agencies also tend to avoid pointing the finger at the system so as to avoid offending their hosts. They are there to deliver food and medicines, not to challenge the state. Thus the UN World Food Programme (WFP), which monitors aid distribution, in a news release in November, blamed the continuing crisis on adverse weather for three years in a row coupled with economic decline caused by the loss of "preferential ties" with the former Soviet Union and changed trading terms with China. It did not mention the Stalinist country's centralised system, or the policy of juche - i.e. self-reliance - which keeps the people shut off from the world.

"You have an almost identical set of circumstances" to the Chinese famine, says Becker, who is now South China Morning Post correspondent in Beijing. "You have a completely closedoff society. Religious-style worship is given to the leader. People are allowed to starve to death to support the myth of self-sufficiency. The difference is that North Korea is the recipient of the world's biggest famine relief in history, and yet we know nothing about what is going in inside the country."

Many NGOs he said "are refusing to condemn the North Korean government because they think that will make things worse. Some people say they see no famine and praise the wonderful distribution system, but the reason for the famine is the economic system, just as 40 years ago people praised the Chinese communists for the commune system when it was causing the famine."

The towns and villages on the Chinese side of the Tumen river that is the border with North Korea are populated by ethnic Koreans. The frontier is guarded but quite porous: the river banks are not fenced or mined and people can walk across the ice in winter.

Ethnic Koreans living on the Chinese side can cross a bridge to visit relatives who have made it to Namyang, a tiny North Korean border town. When I went there in May last year I met people whose North Korean relatives had died from starvation and who described a country where people roamed around looking for food, the dead were buried in rented coffins and peasants were reduced to eating bark and weeds.

Rumours of worse horrors like cannibalism are rife on the Chinese side but impossible to substantiate and rarely given prominence by reporters, but no one doubts the refugees' accounts of relatives' deaths, and a public health disaster because of a lack of drinking water and the spread of TB, dysentery and cholera.

One North Korean official who fled to Jilin Province told Becker that nearly two million people had died and that "so many people are dying no one now bothers to keep a record of the deaths".

A defector called Kim Dong-soo who worked with the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in Rome until late last year said he had heard from his colleagues in North Korea that 2.8 million people had died as a result of famine.

This month the Korean Buddhist Sharing Movement based in South Korea claimed on the basis of interviews with 268 refugees in December-January that 499 had died out of 1,574 family members, a death rate of over 300 per cent. Using these figures they estimate millions are dead.

World Vision vice-president Andrew Natsios says that famine indicators such as selling and eating all farm animals and harvesting wild food are there for all to see. "I know a famine when I see one and there is a famine in North Korea, thousands of people are dying now," he told a US Senate committee last July.

Both sides in the argument accuse the other of naivety.

In September Brigitta Karlgren, WFP country director, said a survey presented by World Vision alleging over half a million deaths lacked credibility because it was not backed up by official figures. Just a month later a WFP official, Namanga Ngongi, said after a tour of the country that food aid had prevented a catastrophe.

A humanitarian worker in Pyongyang told me no one in the expatriate community there believed the accounts of one or two million dead, and that he believed defectors and refugees tended to exaggerate to justify their actions and that they could not know the macro figures of deaths.

This provokes the response that starving refugees have no agenda other than to survive, and that those who escaped the Chinese and Ukraine famines were also ridiculed.

The controversy is also riddled by political considerations. One analyst said North Korea wanted to hide the famine because it implied a failure of its system, but that it had to give it some publicity to attract world aid so Pyongyang calibrated the information it made available. North Korean officials sometimes encourage aid workers to take pictures of malnourished children, yet they reacted furiously when a widely-distributed photograph by one UN official was compared to pictures from an African famine.

Another question which troubles those trying to find the truth is the possibility that some parts of the country - particularly the "black hole", a swathe of the north-eastern countryside where they are not allowed to go - may have a localised famine of terrible proportions, that unknown thousands have died in prisons, labour camps and orphanages for older children which they never see. There is also the question of how much the leadership knows. In China in 1958-82 it was common for local officials to falsify harvest figures.

The great famine writer Armatya Sen makes the point that because of public pressure and independent media, famines don't take place in democracies, though a humanitarian organiser based in Pyongyang noted dryly that democracies tend to be rich developed countries.

There are also ethical dilemmas which colour perceptions on both sides. Food aid could delay necessary reforms, be diverted, or help confirm a government in power. Encouraging reforms to sustain the system could perpetuate the Korean partition.

But for foreign workers in Pyongyang it is clearly impermissible on ethical grounds to use the starvation of the people to destabilise an unwanted regime. Kathi Zellweger remarked that humanitarian agencies need greater transparency, but asked "should we wait until our need for figures, statistics and other conditions is satisfied" while people die of hunger?

Whatever the truth of the situation, both sides agree on two things. It is impossible to know for sure what is going on, and however bad it is, it is about to get much worse.

This is the critical time of year when the autumn harvest stocks are running out. The International Red Cross says food will run out by the end of April. North Korea said its harvest stocks will be gone by the end of March. It estimated grain supplies stood at 167,000 tonnes at the beginning of 1998 to feed 22 million people.

The US is giving 200,000 tonnes and South Korea 50,000 tonnes. The United Nations has appealed to the international community for one million tonnes of food aid to North Korea valued at $415 million, twice as much as it has provided so far in two years.

If they do not make it, the worst has yet to come.