Starving pay the price for defiance of North Korea

They have seen famine. They have lived with all the misery of life within a collapsing command economy run by a self-serving police state that is wedded to the worst habits of the old Soviet Union. Most North Koreans living under Kim Jong Il know what it means to suffer and endure.

But, even from their hardened perspective, the new year and the viciously bleak mid-winter presents an alarmingly prospect. Hunger and shortages loom large for a significant part of the population of 23 million, and this crisis is likely to be deepened by confrontation with the US and its allies.

Hundreds of thousands of metric tonnes of international food aid destined for North Korea's undernourished infants, expectant and nursing mothers and the elderly, are already in jeopardy.

Foreign fuel oil supplies, needed to power the threadbare electricity grid, have been cut off as a punishment for North Korea's secret uranium-enrichment programme conducted in violation of a 1994 accord with Washington. There has been a price to pay for Pyongyang's relentless pursuit of a nuclear programme in defiance of its neighbours and the West, which believes that its chief purpose is to manufacture weapons of mass destruction.

And the price – in a country where nearly half the children under five are chronically malnourished and 4 million schoolchildren are so ill-fed that they are mentally and physically stunted – will be painful.

Stories of the famine of the 1990s, in which hundreds of thousands of North Koreans are believed to have died, are being retold, especially in the south. "My family began selling everything from the sewing machine to blankets, to trade for a sack of corn," Lim Hong-keun, a 42-year-old coal miner who defected to the south, told an audience of students. "Trains often sat idle for two or three days in each station, waiting for electricity," he said.

Although North Korea this year had its best harvest for seven years, there was still a 1 million-tonne shortfall. And one of the main entities that helps plug the food distribution gap – the UN's World Food Programme – is facing an unprecedented shortage of international donors.

The WFP has launched an appeal for 511,000 tonnes of food for North Korea next year but has so far only got a fraction of that amount – 35,000 tonnes – because the three major donors, the United States, Japan and South Korea, have so far held back. The WFP has been forced recently to cut distribution to 3 million North Koreans – mostly women and children – who now face severe malnutrition. Until then it had been helping to feed 6.4 million people.

The agency's executive director, James Morris, warned this month that the WFP may be forced to stop providing aid altogether by 1 April unless donations are forthcoming. A spokesman for the Rome-based agency said yesterday the situation was unchanged.

The United States has for the first time begun imposing conditions on its previously hefty WFP contributions. This move is seen many as a clear attempt to use hunger as political pressure point to get Pyongyang to come into line over its nuclear-related activities, although Washington denies this.

Giving free food to a hostile regime that is trying to develop a nuclear arsenal presents political difficulties for North Korea's neighbours. Last year, Japan contributed 500,000 tonnes of food to the WFP's North Korea operation. This year, it gave nothing – although this had much to do with a row with Pyongyang over the kidnapping of Japanese civilians by the North Korean secret services two decades ago.

The South Korean government has dug deep in its pockets in the past to pay for food deliveries, and will do so again. Newly elected president, Roh Moo Hyun, is committed to extending his predecessor's so-called Sunshine Policy toward his delinquent neighbour. But earlier this month, South Korean port workers refused to load 5,000 tonnes of rice destined for the North in protest at Pyongyang's decision to reopen an old atomic reactor.

The human cost of cuts in WFP aid are likely to be severe. The Korean government's distribution system provides no more than 270 grams of food per person per day – 45 per cent of minimum calorie needs. To this should be added other endemic problems that make life in North Korea harder still – cruel winters, power shortages, chronic mismanagement, and a tendency of the elite to commandeer aid and most of the food.

In November, the WFP reported that North Korea's threshing mills were operating only intermittently because of shortages of power. It said nurseries and kindergartens had very little heating. Some provinces have been reduced to using a mixture of rice husk, maize cones and coal dust for fuel. Supplies of locally made dried skimmed milk – vital for producing biscuits to supplement the diets of under-fed children – were running low.

The position has been worsened by huge increases in prices and wages this summer – the result of North Korea's reforms. WFP analysts say urban families are spending up to 85 per cent of their meagre income on food.