IN a stark North Korean hospital ward a girl called Kim Hyon Sun, aged just 15 months, is fighting a battle that will determine the rest of her life.

Kim is one of thousands of North Korean children whose half-starved mothers cannot feed them breast milk. A few weeks ago the family ran out of powdered milk substitute. She wasted and sickened. She is now slowly pulling through but how strongly she emerges from this crisis will shape her health and mental agility for the rest of her childhood.

“It’s a major problem, this inheritance of hunger,” explained Gerald Bourke of the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), who saw the child last week. “That’s why we try to keep mothers as well nourished as they can be.”

Richard Ragan, the top UN aid official in Pyongyang, says North Korea is slipping back towards the edge of a precipice.

The WFP is keeping millions of North Koreans alive almost a decade after the Stalinist state fell into a deep famine that killed 2m people. Its economy is in ruins, its lands barren and its ports deserted. This summer many of its 23m inhabitants are eating wild grass.

On Tuesday, well fed diplomats from North Korea and five other countries will meet in Beijing for talks on the matter which most worries the outside world: not the plight of Kim Hyon Sun but the nuclear weapons made by Kim Jong-il, the “dear leader” of the communist regime.

Kim has been bribed to return to the negotiating table by promises of electricity and food aid from South Korea, with political pressure also applied by the United States and Japan. Widespread hostility to the regime among donor nations led to a cutback in food supplies that the North Koreans needed to get through the lean months before their autumn harvest.

The human cost of these power politics is all too clear to Bourke and his colleagues from the WFP. They bear witness to hardship that few people can imagine outside the African continent. “It’s absolutely precarious,” said Bourke. “Because of high food prices and shortages, the consumption of wild foods — that’s grasses, acorns, seaweed, mushrooms — has increased substantially.”

A Chinese traveller who recently returned from the country’s northern provinces said: “People are dying but they are dying quietly.”

The “food” sent by the outside world to Kim’s subjects is unappetising. Most of it consists of a ground-up mixture of maize and corn, sprinkled with minerals and vitamins, but even this is becoming a luxury.

In April, as stocks ran short, the UN stopped giving vegetable oil to 1.5m needy old folk, children, pregnant women and nursing mothers. In May the supplies of grains and beans to 1.2m children were halted. One month later 3.6m primary school children were told that they could no longer get cereals.

The nadir may have arrived earlier this month when the regime cut food rations to 200 grams a day. Most scientists think adults need 550 grams.

But the crisis will not be on the agenda on Tuesday when envoys from America, South Korea and Japan, hosted by China, will try to persuade Kim’s emissaries to abandon their nuclear weapons.

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