North Korean Food Aid

#food - Nearly 40 percent of North Korea's population will need food assistance in 2009, according to United Nations food agencies, largely because of critical shortages of fertilizer and fuel.

The World Food Program and the Food and Agriculture Organization said food production was down again for the third year running, in a joint report that said 8.7 million people out of North Korean's total population of 23 million — or 38 percent — will need food assistance in the coming year.

Food assistance will be needed until the next harvest, in October 2009, the report by the two Rome-based U.N. agencies predicted.

The impoverished communist country has relied on foreign assistance to feed its people since natural disasters and mismanagement devastated its economy in the mid-1990s.

Source: Associated Press, World Food Program, Food & Agriculture Organisation