posted July 27, 2005 12:15 AM            

Tuesday, July 26, 2005 2:38 p.m. EDT
U.N.: Starving N. Koreans Scavenging for Acorns, Grass and Seaweed

North Korea's government and international aid agencies are running short of food, forcing hungry people to scavenge for acorns, grass and seaweed, the U.N. food agency said Tuesday as talks on the North's nuclear program began in China's capital.

The United States has promised to send 50,000 metric tons of cereals to help feed millions of malnourished North Koreas, but that aid is not expected to arrive for three months, said Gerald Bourke, a Beijing-based spokesman for the World Food Program.

There is "very little" left in WFP stockpiles in the North, Burke said, though he did not give exact figures. About one in three North Koreans are chronically malnourished, he said.

The agency stopped supplying vegetable oil to 1.2 million North Korean women and children in March and has stopped giving beans and grain to steadily larger groups since then, he said.

"People are gathering wild food, grasses, bracken [ferns], acorns," Bourke said after returning Monday from a three-week trip to the North. "I've seen people going up into the hills with sacks and coming down with sacks of grass and picking through seaweed."

North Korea has relied on foreign aid to feed its 23 million people since disclosing in the mid-1990s that its government-run farm system had collapsed following decades of mismanagement and the loss of Soviet subsidies.

The WFP tries to feed about 6.5 million North Koreans, or more than one-quarter of the country's population.

For 2005, it requires 504,000 tons of food but so far has secured only about 270,000 tons, or a little more than half of what it needs, Bourke said.

"We're looking at a pretty bleak rest of the year," he said. "We've already had large-scale cutbacks and there is more to come unless we get fairly substantial new pledges."

In addition, market reforms have pushed the price of staples such as rice and corn up by as much as four times since last year, he said.

Prices are so high that the average urban worker's entire annual salary - 2,000-2,500 won, or the equivalent of $900-$1,140 - will buy only about 5 1/2 pounds of rice or less than 8 pounds of corn at free market prices, he said.

Most urban North Koreans rely for food from government ration stations or household gardens.

Foreign donors have given more than 8 million tons of food to North Korea since the mid-1990s. But the WFP has struggled in recent years to meet aid targets for the North, getting as little as 60 percent of its annual needs.

In Washington, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the United States was working closely with the WFP on delivering its aid.

On Tuesday, diplomats began the fourth round of six-nation talks aimed at getting North Korea to give up its alleged cache of nuclear weapons.

Despite the tensions over its nuclear program, the United States, South Korea and Japan - participants in the six-nation talks - are major food donors to the North. China, which is Pyongyang's last major ally, also is a key supplier of food and energy aid.

Other governments express frustration at the North's limits on aid agencies' ability to monitor who receives food.