Torrential rain has devastated swathes of North Korea, forcing more than 1,000 families from their homes, destroying crops and severely damaging railway lines, the official KCNA news agency said yesterday.
Floods and erosion on overused hillsides in 1995 tipped chronic malnutrition into a famine that aid experts say killed more than 1 million people and still leaves its mark on the impoverished communist state.
KCNA said that last month, the rainy season on the divided Korean peninsula, downpours had flooded or washed away at least 100,000 hectares of fields and many buildings, including homes for more than 1,000 families.
"It is hard to expect any harvest from the fields washed away or silted," the agency said. "Harvest in many fields is expected to drop 30 percent."
Rains since early last month have caused widespread damage, cutting off rail services in many areas of the centre and south and washing away roads, KCNA said in its rare report on a natural disaster. It did not mention casualties or deaths.
Officials at South Korea's Red Cross and the Unification Ministry said by telephone they were seeking further information and the North had not yet asked for help.
Planned North-South ministerial talks this week look likely to be postponed because of the North's anger over a South Korean operation last week to bring some 460 North Korean refugees to the South.
North Korea depends on foreign aid to feed about a quarter of its 22.5 million people. Food shortages have prompted hundreds of thousands of North Koreans to seek refuge in neighboring China.
Recent South Korean research shows North Korea is expected to suffer food shortages of around 1 million tonnes this year due in part to less fertiliser support from other countries, the South's Yonhap news agency has said.
Russia has sent 35,000 tonnes of food to North Korea as part of the World Food Programme's aid plans, the United Nations agency said in a statement which noted the shipment was Moscow's first donation to North Korea through the WFP.
The statement quoted Richard Ragan, WFP country director for North Korea, as saying Russian wheat would end a two-month interruption in rations to to pregnant and nursing women and to children in schools, orphanages, hospitals and nurseries.
"But as things stand, there is little aid in the pipeline for the latter months of the year," Ragan said.
The WFP has received confirmed pledges of just 125,000 tonnes of the target of 484,000 tonnes of food it appealed for this year to feed 6.5 million North Koreans, he said.
"We urgently need firm commitments to plug that gap."
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