'Floods kill hundreds in North Korea'
Updated on 14 August 2007
North Korea has asked for international help after it reported massive flooding had left hundreds of people dead or missing.
Pyongyang said floodwaters had left "tens of thousands of hectares of farmland (to be) inundated, buried under silt and washed away".
Paul Risley, Asia spokesman for the UN World Food Programme (WFP), said: "If the figures are borne out by our own assessment, then we are very concerned that this is a significant emergency crisis."
"It is still very early in this process but we have received a preliminary request from North Korean authorities, asking for our assistance."
He said an UN agency assessment team in North Korea - which has struggled with chronic food shortages for years - is heading for the flood-hit areas.
In an unusual move, the secretive state's official TV station broadcast images of the damage, showing rain-swollen rivers and pedestrians walking through waist-deep water in flooded Pyongyang streets.
At least 800 public buildings and more than 540 bridges have been washed away and thousands of homes ruined, according to reports in the country.
The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said it is on 24-hour alert to monitor damage.
The flooding has hit most of the southern half of North Korea and includes the capital and some of its most productive agricultural regions. More rain is forecast for those areas over the next few days.
Years of mismanagement of the farming sector mean the country does not produce enough food to feed its nearly 23 million people. Famine in the late 1990s might have killed up to 10 per cent of the population, experts have said.
Even in a good year, North Korea still falls about 1 million tonnes short of the food it needs to feed its people.
The WFP is the main international aid agency on the ground in North Korea trying to feed the country's poor.
Three big storms hit North Korea in 2006, and a pro-Pyongyang newspaper reported that more than 800 people were killed or went missing in the resulting floods.
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