TOKYO — The ravages of floods and soured diplomacy have turned North Korea's chronic food shortages into an imminent humanitarian crisis, the World Food Program warned Wednesday, declaring that the secretive dictatorship will require massive food aid in the coming months if it is to avert widespread hunger.
The United Nations agency projects that North Korea's food shortages will be double last year's deficit. Prices on food items including rice, potatoes and pork have soared 25% over the last three weeks in the capital, Pyongyang, a bastion for the regime's loyalists.
"Local officials are openly asking us for support, something we've never seen before," said the head of the World Food Program's North Korea operation, Jean-Pierre de Margerie, in a telephone interview from Pyongyang. "They are telling us that they are going to have to suspend distribution in some places because there simply is not enough food in the system."
The North Korean government has made no request to widen the U.N. agency's existing effort, which is feeding or supplementing the nutrition of about 1 million people in the country of 23 million.
The shriveling food stocks come after massive flooding last summer that washed away soil and crops in the rice- and maize-producing lowlands known as the Cereal Bowl. North Korea's own statistics show that the rice harvest fell by a quarter and maize production was off by a third.
The U.N. agency says it has no reports of people starving, though it has been barred since 2006 from northeastern regions where shortages are usually most severe. De Margerie added that high fuel costs had severely curbed North Korea's ability to truck food supplies to non-food-producing regions of the country.
Human rights organizations say sources in North Korea report increasing absenteeism from factory jobs in some provinces, with workers no longer able to survive on government handouts and scrambling to earn money elsewhere.
North Korea has long been forced to make up annual shortfalls in production by buying food in foreign markets and through massive food aid from China, South Korea and other donors that funnel their contributions through the U.N. agency. South Korea alone typically provided its neighbor with about 500,000 tons of food aid annually and met more than half the 2007 shortfall.
