North Korea's cereals output has grown this year, helping ease a severe food shortage, but the country can only produce about 80 percent of what it needs to feed its 23 million people and malnutrition rates are still high.
Some 6.5 million vulnerable people in the isolated and impoverished country would require outside aid to survive next year, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization and World Food Program predicted in an annual report.
Malnutrition rates were still "alarmingly high," the report said.
Among the targets of WFP food aid would be a new category of urban poor who have seen their food security crumble in the wake of radical price and wage reforms adopted by the Stalinist state in July last year, the WFP's representative in Pyongyang, Rick Corsino, said in Beijing on Thursday.
North Korea, embroiled for the past year in a standoff with the US over its nuclear-weapons program, is still struggling to recover from a famine in the mid-1990s caused by natural disasters and economic mismanagement.
After food loans, aid already in the pipeline and a small amount of food North Korea buys, the UN report predicted the country still needed about 400,000 tonnes of cereals. WFP aid was also short of its target.
"In November, we are going to drop off close to 700,000 people from distributions, mainly elderly and care givers in childrens institutions," Corsino told a news conference.
Kindergarten and public school children would start to drop off the distribution list in January and February. And by March, if the WFP did not get contributions, it would have to drop off more vulnerable beneficiaries, he said.
Ironically, the economic reforms adopted in July last year, which raised workers' wages, freed up market prices for grains and were aimed at spurring the moribund economy, have hurt some workers.
Many factories and work units had cut back production and work hours and were unable to pay full wages.
Some people were forced to use as much as 60 percent of their wages on food, and still were not getting a balanced diet, Corsino said.
There were signs that industrial workers' households had become more vulnerable over the past year and the trend may worsen in the short to medium term, the report said. The industrial northeast was believed to be hardest hit.
The WFP had discussed with the government a pilot plan to deliver aid to those hurt by the reforms, Corsino said.
"Any county or district that has 90 percent or more of its population dependent on the public distribution system, we are going to try to reach the lowest 15 or 20 percent of the PDS dependants," he said.
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