Nine million in North Korea go hungry

North Korea urgently needs to improve its 'abysmal' human rights record and feed its millions of starving people, a United Nations envoy has said. One-third of the country's population was going hungry needlessly, the official said yesterday in a damning report about the secretive country. Almost 9 million people in the country North Korea are suffering from food shortages, the report said. And the World Food Programme (WFP) can only help about 2 million of these hungry people because there is not enough international aid after countries cut funding in protest against the country’ s nuclear tests.

The UN put trade bans on North Korea after it tested a second nuclear device in May this year, after a previous test in 2006. Its envoy said yesterday that the country was not poor and should drop its policy of feeding its army before its ordinary people."I estimate at least a third of the population are in the hunger situation out of the projected 24 million population, said Vitit Muntarbhorn, the UN rapporteur for North Korea. Presenting his latest report to the UN general assembly committee that deals with human rights issues, Thai human-rights expert, Mr Muntarbhorn said that food supplies have also been affected by the Korean government’s efforts to control economic activity, particularly by restricting the role of women.

Women younger than 49 are not allowed to trade, according to the report, and some markets have been closed which has led to several clashes between female traders and the authorities. Women have also been forbidden to ride bicycles, often essential for getting to work, and forced to wear skirts rather than trousers. "The human rights situation in the country remains abysmal owing to the repressive nature of the power base: at once cloistered, controlled and callous," he said. "While many members of the population are in abject poverty,” he said, officials control the country's vast mineral wealth.

Mr Muntarbhorn has not been allowed into North Korea, and depended instead on accounts from UN agencies working in the country, human rights groups and refugees who have fled to South Korea, Japan and Mongolia. He described an atmosphere of repression, dreadful prisons and said people were sent to labour camps for things like failing to turn up to work or watching films from South Korea.But North Korea's deputy UN ambassador Pak Tok-hun has said the report is "full of distortion, lies, falsity, devised by hostile forces".

By Hayley Jarvis for SOS Children