NORTH KOREA:THE IMPOVERISHED existence of North Korea's 23 million inhabitants is at risk of deteriorating into "a tragedy", the UN food agency warned yesterday.
Long-term food shortages have been exacerbated by last year's floods, which devastated the country's agricultural production, while key donors China and South Korea are expected to reduce their direct aid to the country this year.
Relations on the peninsula have deteriorated sharply since the new president, Lee Myung-bak, took power in Seoul in February.
Pyongyang is furious at his insistence that humanitarian assistance depends on the progress it makes in dismantling its nuclear weapons programme, a break with the previous "sunshine policy" of engagement.
The World Food Programme (WFP) estimates that 6.5 million people are already short of food. It said state rations were dwindling while prices in the markets had doubled, with a 1kg of rice now costing about one-third of a typical worker's monthly salary.
"The food security situation is clearly bad and getting worse," said Tony Banbury, Asia regional director for the WFP. "It is increasingly likely that external assistance will be required to avert a tragedy."
Seoul has not yet sent its annual fertiliser donation to the north, which is likely to cause a reduction in this year's harvest. Hundreds of thousands of North Koreans are believed to have died in the famine of the 1990s. -