State media in the isolated country called it "the worst drought in 100 years"
By Chris Arsenault
ROME, June 18 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - North Korea faces further food shortages as production in the country's main growing region is expected to be cut in half, the United Nations food agency said.
U.N. representatives visited the country's breadbasket in North Hwanghae and South Hwanghae provinces on June 10 and found that potato, wheat and barley harvests were at risk of being cut by up to 50 percent in drought-hit areas.
Wells are dry and reservoir levels are low following below-normal rainfall and snowfall in 2014 and early 2015, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) said in a statement.
"We don't have enough information to say if people are starving or not," senior FAO official Liliana Balbi told the Thomson Reuters Foundation on Thursday. "But the situation is serious. They are on the borderline."
State media in the isolated country called it "the worst drought in 100 years".
The latest El Nino weather phenomenon is reponsible for much of the current dryness, the FAO report said.
In addition to the drought, the government has not properly maintained irrigation canals and other farm infrastructure, Balbi said.
Rice production in 2015 is expected at 2.3 million tonnes, 12 percent below 2014's shrivelled output and considerably lower than the previous five-year average, the FAO said.
Rice plantings face a "severe contraction" the FAO said based on preliminary information garnered from inside the reculsive state.
North Korea is under U.N. sanctions because of its banned nuclear programme and missile launches.
The number of hungry people in North Korea has more than doubled in the last two decades, rising to 10.5 million in 2014 from 4.8 million in 1990, according to an FAO report released in late May.
The country suffered famine in the 1990s and has relied on international food aid since. But support for North Korea has fallen sharply in recent years, because of its curbs on humanitarian workers and reluctance to allow monitoring of food distribution.
Funding for U.N. agencies in North Korea plunged to less than $50 million in 2014 from $300 million in 2004.
(Reporting By Chris Arsenault; Editing by Leslie Gevirtz; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's rights, trafficking, corruption and climate change. Visit www.trust.org)
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