NORTH KOREA: Six years after a devastating, two-year-long famine, North Korea suffers from a chronic shortage of food that can be seen most clearly in the faces of babies in state-run orphanages, writes Clifford Coonan in Beijing.
Gerald Bourke, who is the UN World Food Programme's spokesman on North Korea, pointed to the sad faces in a photograph from an orphanage in Chongjin in the northeast of the Stalinist country.
"You can see they're very anaemic, a lot of them are very lethargic with vacant expressions. They have facial sores presumably from some kind of micronutrient deficiency," said the Irishman, back in Beijing after a three-month tour in North Korea.
"I have been to that particular baby home three times and every time it's a heart-rending experience. It isn't getting any better. You look at the eyes, it's just so sad. A lot of them were rocking back and forth as if in some kind of emotional distress, which could also be related to vitamin or mineral deficiency," he told The Irish Times.
Food is running short in North Korea. The WFP is trying to feed 6.5 million people - nearly one third of the country's population of 22 million - but can only manage around half of that.
As usual it is children who suffer most from poor diet. Low birthweight babies never get a chance to attain the correct weight, beginning a cycle of ill-health and malnourishment.
Typically in North Korea, an average child is a lot lighter at birth. Elsewhere mothers put on 10 kilos on average during pregnancy, in North Korea they put on five kilos.
"As well as being very lethargic, they're very sad-faced. There were two or three of us in the visiting party, they were saying 'Mummy' in Korean to the women and 'Daddy' to the men. There are care-givers, but it seemed pretty clear the kids weren't getting the tender loving care that children need," said Mr Bourke.
The spacious, clean orphanage houses 60 children, not all of them orphans - some have one parent who is supposedly unable to take care of them for economic reasons.
Also it is government policy to remove triplets from their parents because the state believes that three children at once is too much for people to cope with.
The infants in the Chongjin home, who are all aged between a few months to three or four years old, are better fed than your average North Korean baby or infant as it is a government run baby home and it also gets support from WFP, Unicef and the Red Cross.
Surveys by various UN agencies show that 42 per cent of North Korean children are suffering from chronic malnutrition or stunting, while one third of mothers surveyed were malnourished and anaemic.
Mr Bourke said: "Our problem is that we haven't got sufficient donations to allow us to implement our programme fully. All kinds of people are having to be cut off from our distribution channels. This is a chronic food crisis.
"Much of the population is living on the edge, they don't have enough in terms of quantity or diet. All kinds of things that we take for granted they don't have. Most people there don't have meat, fish, eggs, except on very rare occasions like the birthday of the Great Leader."
North Korea maintains a cult around its leader, Kim Jong Il, the Dear Leader, who took over after his father Kim Il Sung, the Great Leader, died in 1994.
Mr Bourke singled out the Irish government for praise. "The Irish government has been great. We got quite recently a €750,000 cash donation and we are using it to buy vegetable oil. We've had very little coming.
"Many of the nursery and kindergarten children in the western part of the country have not had any vegetable oil from us since October. And vegetable oil is a very important source of fat for young kids," he said.
In the six-month-long, cold winter, the only vegetable most of the population consumes is kimchi, a pickled cabbage or radish.
Limited economic reforms means markets are opening up, which is helping to boost the floundering economy but also making food more expensive.
Mr Bourke visited the site of last month's train crash in Ryongchon, and bore witness to the catastrophic sights there. However, he said the priority for his organisation remained feeding the hungry.
"No disrespect to the people of Ryongchon, but this broader programme seeks to feed 6.5 million and we just don't have enough," he said.
Donor nations, particularly the world's richest country, the United States, suspect that food aid is diverted away from the needy to the country's 1.1 million-strong military.
Japan, once a key donor, has also withheld aid because it says Pyongyang has yet to clarify the kidnapping of Japanese nationals in the 1970s and 1980s.
"Donor concerns are legitimate but we firmly believe the food assistance goes where it should. The army gets first cut of the national rice harvest. They basically don't need our food," he says.
Donors have also grown impatient with the North Korean government in the capital Pyongyang over its attempts to build nuclear weapons.
"The government in Pyongyang understands that after nine years in the country that we don't have an agenda, that our mandate is to feed the hungry wherever they are, that we're well-intentioned.
"Slowly, progressively, our operating conditions are improving. It's getting better. They are co-operating with us in our drive to get more food," he said. The WFP wants donor nations to put aside political concerns over Pyongyang's nuclear weapons programme and concentrate on the humanitarian plight of ordinary North Koreans.
North Korea has depended on foreign food aid since it confessed in the mid-1990s that its state-run farming industry had collapsed after decades of mismanagement and the loss of subsidies following the collapse of its main patron, the Soviet Union.
"Chongjin had a lot of flourishing industries functioning at a reasonable rate back when North Korea had markets, like the Soviet Union. Now it's just a rust-bucket, you see mile after mile of derelict factory and rarely a smoking chimney," he said.