SIXTY of 270 children in a North Korean orphanage died from hunger related diseases last year, and many more are at risk, according to an official of the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) who has just returned from a visit to the impoverished country.
Mr Peter McDermott, deputy director of UNICEF, made the discovery at an orphanage at Wonton in the Kangwon Province, according to UNICEF spokeswoman, Ms Marie Hueze.
Mr McDermott said that in visits to clinics, nurseries, kindergartens and orphanages, he saw severely malnourished children. The pictures on this page give a haunting impression of conditions in the "world's last Stalinist state".
He said the country's ration system was on the verge of collapse. In the short term, more and more of North Korea's 2.6 million young children were at risk.
It was not known if the 60 orphans who died were among the 134 children North Korea admitted perished from hunger related diseases last year, or if the orphanage in Wonton was an isolated case.
The North Korean government last week issued a list of cities with the dates when stocks would run out. In some the date has already passed.
A delegation from Trocaire is going to North Korea today to assess the situation there.
The UN's Food and Agriculture Programme and the World Food Programme warned last week that famine and starvation would soon grip the country, which has been hit by two years of severe flooding and has lost its life support system from the former Soviet Union.
Last week South Korea began shipping food supplies into North Korea under an agreement reached between Red Cross representatives from the two countries, which are still technically at war.
The communist country with a population of 22.3 million people has slipped into a torpid state where the infrastructure of daily life has disintegrated, according to ethnic Koreans living in China who have access to relatives inside North Korea.
Reuter adds from Seoul: North Korea is expected to agree to a meeting of senior officials from the United States and South Korea to arrange four nation peace talks, a South Korean foreign ministry spokesman said yesterday.
Mr Lee Kyuhyung said progress had been made in working level discussions among the three countries in New York recently and South Korea was "cautiously optimistic" about the prospects of peace talks this year.
The four nation talks, also involving China, are aimed at working out a peace settlement to replace the armistice that ended the 1950-53 Korean War.
In a similar meeting in New York last April, famine threatened North Korea agreed in principle to join four nation peace talks but made its participation conditional on large scale food aid and an easing of US trade sanctions.
Washington and Seoul say humanitarian assistance would be provided to help stave off a catastrophe but Pyongyang must not be allowed to use participation in the fourway talks as leverage to extract food assistance.