New light has been shed on the scale of the humanitarian crisis facing North Korea, with journalists from the Reuters news service granted rare access to a paediatric hospital and school for orphans.
Doctors say a harsh winter and heavy flooding mean children are suffering from diarrhea and digestive problems while others are suffering from fungal infections.
The UN World Food Programme said last week that one-third of North Korean children under five are chronically malnourished.
In a posting on its website, it said many more are at risk of slipping into acute stages of malnutrition unless targeted assistance is sustained.
US relief groups have pleaded with the US government to offer food assistance to North Korea, saying hunger was worsening and could develop into a major crisis next year.
Reporters were told people west of Pyongyang are forced to live on potatoes and corn, but even these staples are fast disappearing.
South Korea and the US, formerly the country's biggest aid donors, are yet to resume the aid they cut off in 2008, in response to the North's nuclearisation and the stalling of talks.
Despite appeals from the North, emergency food aid offered by the South was last week retracted, with Seoul saying its offer was not responded to.
South Korea's Unification Minister Yu Woo-Ik told an annual parliamentary audit of his ministry that the North's rice crop seemed to be falling only a little short of the average.
"I don't think (the food situation) is very serious," he said, without elaborating, according to Yonhap news agency.
It's reported the state has slashed food rations to just 200 grams a day.
Yu said South Korea may give its neighbour aid if it shows commitment to denuclearisation.
Seoul and Washington are demanding this as a precondition for the resumption of long-stalled six-party talks on the North's nuclear disarmament.
Pyongyang, however, demands the talks resume without preconditions.
North Korea went through a famine in the 1990s in which hundreds of thousands of people are said to have died.
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