Awwal 22, 1432 H/Feb 25, 2011, SPA -- Impoverished North Korea is headed for another year of sharp food shortages but its multiple requests for aid appear disproportionate, suggesting it wants to stockpile food rather than feed the hungry, officials in the South said, according to Reuters. Years of mismanaged farm policy and natural disasters in the 1990s resulted in famine that some estimates said killed as many as a million people. North Korea, involved in a face-off with the West over its nuclear weapons programme, faces "looming food shortages and alarming malnutrition", five U.S. aid agencies said on Wednesday, urging emergency food aid for the country. The diplomatically isolated country has been asking most countries in the world, other than the poorest, for food aid for several months, one official said. "It's all they can talk about -- food," the official said on the condition of anonymity. "It's not news any more that a country's been asked for aid. You tell me a country that hasn't been asked. That'll be news." Another official, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said the drive to secure food beyond immediate needs may be linked to leader Kim Jong-il's push to prepare his youngest son to succeed him and the long-pledged plan to create a "strong prosperous nation" by 2012, the centenary of state founder Kim Il-sung's birth. "They have these big celebrations they have been promising for next year, and it's not going to look good if they can't come up with presents for the people," the official said. Analysis of North Korea's food production data by international agencies is still incomplete but there is a consensus that there was a modest improvement in the harvest in 2010, according to some South Korean officials and U.N. agencies. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation said the North's food output likely grew by 3 percent in 2010 from the year earlier, with total production at 4.5 million tonnes. One of the government officials said his assessment was that production was in fact higher than the FAO figure, perhaps the best harvest in years. But he said the North still falls acutely short of what is needed to feed its 23 million people even in a good year by as much as a million tonnes. An official at the South Korean Unification Ministry said poor weather meant it was unlikely there had been an improvement in the harvest.
