North Korea's food shortage may worsen, agency says.
The World Food Program warns that the country will need massive aid to prevent widespread hunger.
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 today, 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 ranging from rice and potatoes to port 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 see before," said the head of the World Food Program's North Korean 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 so far made no request to widen the existing World Food Program effort that is feeding or supplementing the nutrition of about 1 million people in the country of 23 million.
Shriveling food stocks follow massive flooding last summer, which washed away soil and crops in the country's rice and maize-producing "Cereal Bowl." North Korea's own statistics show the rice harvest fell by a quarter, while maize production was off by a third.
World Food Program says it has no reports of people starving, though the agency has been barred since 2006 from northeastern regions where shortages are normally most severe. De Margerie added that high fuel costs have severely curbed North Korea's ability to truck food supplies to non-food producing regions of the country.
Human rights organizations say that sources inside 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 who funnel their contributions through the World Food Program. South Korea alone typically provided its northern neighbor with about 500,000 tons of food aid, and met more than half the 2007 shortfall.
