MORE than a million of the most vulnerable women and children in North Korea have been cut off from international food aid while diplomats argue over the details of the regime’s agreement to shut down its nuclear weapons plant.

The plight of the malnourished civilians ruled by Kim Jong-il and the Korean Workers’ party has slipped out of the public eye while the outside world concentrates on hard geopolitics.

But the handful of foreign aid staff permitted to stay inside Kim’s hermetic Stalinist state fear that the weakest and youngest of his subjects risk slow starvation.

Outside aid has all but ceased because foreign donors — even the regime’s ally China — have used food shortages to put pressure on its leadership. To make matters worse the country suffered severe floods and a bad harvest last autumn.

“We estimate more than 6m Koreans still need food aid and about 1.9m of them, pregnant women, nursing mothers and children under five, are most vulnerable,” said Jean-Pierre de Margerie, representative of the United Nations World Food Programme in North Korea.

The number of mothers and children being fed by the UN is just 700,000. They get fortified noodles, biscuits and soya-blended milk.

De Margerie said no outside help is reaching the others. Rates of malnutrition, sickness, infant mortality and deaths in or after childbirth are likely to be rising.

“That’s the harsh reality,” he said, speaking from Pyongyang, the North Korean capital. “People don’t have enough to put on the table at night.”

Dark, cold and isolated, North Korea is entering its lean season as last year’s food stocks run out and even city dwellers get only one hour of electricity a day. The UN calculates that food supplies nationwide are up to a fifth below the minimum required.

Outsiders can only guess at the privations endured in the countryside, for much of North Korea is a black hole of misinformation, although reports have reached Pyongyang of at least one village whose inhabitants froze to death.

“What’s frustrating is that we have very limited access,” said de Margerie. Only 29 of North Korea’s 200 counties are open to aid workers. Until 2005, when the regime threw out most of the foreign aid community, it could check conditions in 160 counties.

The last UN survey was done in 2004 when investigators concluded 37% of North Korean children were chronically underfed, with stunted growth and retarded development. A third of mothers were famished and anaemic. Now things may be worse.

There was plenty of food on the tables, however, for a South Korean delegation that arrived in Pyongyang last week to talk about resuming aid in exchange for progress in shutting down the north’s main nuclear reactor.

But discussions broke up on Friday with no agreement to send desperately needed rice and fertiliser from the south.

To the US and its allies it was an encouraging sign that South Korea is standing firm to split humanitarian aid off from the nuclear dispute and to divide Kim’s antagonists.

Food aid became a political issue when western donors and Japan began insisting on checks to make sure it reached the needy. De Margerie conceded that even today the UN could not “monitor 100%” of its aid. Privately former UN officials in Pyongyang will admit that in the past some of the supplies were feeding Kim’s army and security forces.

The Americans now want the Chinese and the South Koreans to tighten up, arguing that everyone is looking to Kim to comply with his agreement on February 13 to work towards nuclear disarmament.

The problem for the Bush administration is that the North Koreans believe it is weak and its policy is in disarray. The latest embarrassment was an American admission last week that intelligence on a clandestine North Korean uranium nuclear programme could have been flawed.

North Korea tested a nuclear bomb last year and openly boasts of its prowess in making warheads from plutonium, the alternative element, which is produced in its reactor at Yongbyon.

But it has never confirmed suspicions that it acquired a second set of nuclear technology based on uranium from Abdul Qadeer Khan, the rogue Pakistani scientist, although foreign intelligence services believe it bought high-quality aluminium components for the process.

“Like the Iraqi high-strength aluminium tubes used by the CIA to argue that Iraq was building thousands of gas centrifuges, the analysis of North Korea’s programme also appears to be flawed,” wrote David Albright, the American weapons expert.

“From Kim’s perspective, the diplomacy is going well,” a western diplomat said.

The North Koreans are about to welcome Mohamed El-Baradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, to discuss inspections of its facilities.

They are likely to get back millions of dollars in funds frozen in foreign banks after the United States conceded not all the money was illegally acquired or counterfeit.

The regime is also mounting a shrill campaign against South Korea’s conservative opposition, confident that a few concessions will help the left-inclined government in Seoul to defeat its pro-US foes in elections later this year.

Only the hungry mothers and children of North Korea, unaware of the politics complicating their plight, are certain to be the losers.

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