Famine in North Korea

Flooding and poor harvests have caused North Korea's worst food crisis since the late 1990s and have put millions at risk, the United Nations' food body said Wednesday. The World Food Program said North Korea's food shortage has worsened this year after floods in 2007, followed by poor harvests, leading to the threat of widespread malnutrition. "Millions of vulnerable North Koreans are at risk of slipping toward precarious hunger levels. The last time hunger was so deep and so widespread in parts of the country was in the late 1990s," Jean-Pierre de Margerie, the WFP's country director for North Korea, told a news conference. The WFP had been given permission to launch a widespread new operation to target those most vulnerable in eight of the country's 10 provinces, or 6.4 million people, up from a current 1.2 million. An international appeal for aid would be launched in the next two weeks. While 400,000 metric tons of U.S. food aid have already shipped, there is an urgent need for $20 million to get through the next autumn harvest, de Margerie said. The North has resorted to outside handouts to help feed its 23 million people since the mid-1990s when natural disasters and mismanagement devastated its centrally controlled economy. An estimated 2 million people in the North died of hunger at the time.