N. Korean poor turn cannibal

Hunger in North Korea is forcing peasants to delay burials to prevent cannibalism, and the UN's food aid agency has called for emergency help to prevent "one of the biggest humanitarian disasters of our lifetime".

In increasingly horrific reports of disaster, visitors to China's border with the Stalinist hermit state said that peasants were selling their clothes for food and were sneaking into China to steal animal feed.

Some peasants were keeping their dead at home until the corpses began to putrefy before burial as they feared the bodies would be dug up and eaten by hungry farmers, Chinese residents said. Reuters - Peking