“My sense is we have a crisis in front of us,” James Morris, executive director of the UN World Food Programme (WFP), said yesterday.

The political situation in North Korea and humanitarian crises in southern Africa, Sudan, the Horn of Africa and Asia have distracted attention and funds from the WFP’s efforts in North Korea, Mr Morris said. The agency, which supports 6.5 million of the state’s 23 million people, faces a food shortfall of 140,000 tons.

Stating that only $24 (£13.45) is needed to feed a North Korean child for a year, Mr Morris noted that the US is giving less than in previous years, while erstwhile donor Japan has made no commitment due to “political issues”.

While applauding South Korea’s pledge to donate 500,000 tons of rice directly to the North, he urged Seoul to channel the aid via the WFP, rather than bilaterally, arguing that the organisation has the necessary infrastructure to ensure that the most vulnerable people get the aid.

Gerald Bourke, the WFP’s North Korea spokesman, said that despite improvements in recent years, the food situation was again turning desperate.

“What you see is people walking up hills with sacks, and coming down with grasses, nuts and roots,” he said. “They mix it with maize husks to make a kind of porridge. It fills them up, but does terrible things to their digestive systems.”

Mr Morris said that acute malnutrition had affected 7 per cent of North Korean children last year, while 37 per cent were chronically malnourished. Among women, 35 per cent were anaemic and 32 per cent malnourished. Things look worse this year Pyong-yang is unlikely to realise its goal of a 3 per cent increase in agricultural productivity, he said.

Mr Morris pinpointed three domestic causes of the impending emergency. A shortage of food, a cut in governmental rations and economic reforms have pushed food prices out of the reach of many citizens.

North Korea was devastated by famines in the mid to late 1990s — a period known to North Koreans as the “arduous march” — that may have killed 10 per cent of the population.

Then, rural areas were the hardest hit. Today, city dwellers are most at risk. Mr Bourke said: “On the northeast coast are these erstwhile industrial cities of derelict factories and unemployed and underemployed people.

“In the countryside, people can raise animals and plants. People in the cities can’t do that — they are squeezed in all kinds of directions.”

A long-term solution to the food shortages facing the country, where only 18 per cent of the land is suitable for farming, appears distant. “The only way out is a fairly massive economic transformation,” Mr Bourke said.

In some places, daily government rations have been cut from 250g to just 200g for staples such as rice — less than half of what an individual needs.

Mr Morris said that North Korea had forecast growth of 3 per cent in farm production this year, but the WFP doubted that would be achieved.

“Our conversations with people throughout the country suggest that’s not likely to materialise,” he said. “Earlier this year, the price of maize and wheat was increasing rapidly.”

He added: “Issues like nuclear programmes make it more difficult for political leaders to generate public support among their voters and their citizens for humanitarian work at places where political relationships are a bit strained.”

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