HUNGER is tightening its grip on North Korea and thin, lethargic children are the harbingers of a famine that could strike the impoverished state this month, UN officials said yesterday.
Already meagre food rations are in danger of disappearing in a country racked by floods, failed harvests and a failing communist economy, said Ms Catherine Bertini, executive director of the UN's World Food Programme (WFP).
"Immediate assistance is absolutely necessary on the part of the international community in order to help stave off potential malnutrition and potential starvation," she said.
A diet of rice, roots and dried leaves has stunted the growth of children in villages still trying to recover from summer floods in 1995 and 1996, Ms Bertini said.
Worsening conditions in the countryside appeared to be directly linked to the sacking of the North Korean farm minister earlier this month, Ms Bertini said.
"In general, people hold their jobs as long as they do a good job," she said of the dismissal, one of several recent shakeups in Pyongyang's power structure.
Government authorities are handing out 100 grams of rice a day to each person, a meagre ration that provides just one-fifth the daily calories needed by an adult, she said.
Severe flooding has laid down thick layers of sand on once-fertile fields and has swept away most farm animals and poultry, robbing farmers of valuable protein.
"There's very little protein in this diet and very little volume. People have told us their meat supply is practically nonexistent," Ms Bertini said.
North Korea, whose juche ideology of strict self-reliance once made it fiercely scornful of foreign aid, needs to import about 2.3 million tonnes of grain for 1997 to ward off the spectre of famine, she said.
"Even the government officials themselves say that by the end of March, beginning of April, the food is going to run out," Ms Bertini said.
The WFP will start handing out 100,000 tonnes of grains and soy beans to farmers on April 1st, with 20 per cent of that going to children under the age of five, she said.
"With the present system everybody gets the same ration, which means everybody has the same level of malnutrition," the WFP country director for North Korea, Ms Birgitta Karlgren, said. "When it strikes, it [famine] strikes everybody."