North Korea seeks help after floods ravage country

SEOUL, Aug 14 (Reuters) North Korea is seeking international help after it reported massive flooding had left hundreds of people dead or missing and swept away many buildings, a UN aid agency spokesman said today.

North Korea, which has struggled with chronic food shortages for years, also said in a report early today that floodwaters caused ''tens of thousands of hectares of farmland (to be) inundated, buried under silt and washed away''.

Paul Risley, Asia spokesman with 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,'' Risley said by telephone from Bangkok.

He said an UN agency assessment team left Pyongyang today, headed for flood-hit areas.

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. The damage figures North Korea reported last year were lower than for this year's flooding.

South Korea's Unification Ministry said today it expected damage to be worse than last year. The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said it is on 24-hour alert to monitor damage.

A unification ministry official said the government was looking into possible flood aid for North Korea but had not received any request from Pyongyang.

The floods were not expected to affect a planned leaders' summit between the two Koreas on Auggust 28-30, he added.

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. The broadcast was monitored in Seoul.

BUILDINGS, BRIDGES WASHED AWAY North Korea's official KCNA news agency said at least 800 public buildings and more than 540 bridges had been washed away, while sections of railroad had been destroyed and thousands of homes ruined.

The communist state's infrastructure outside of showcase projects in the capital Pyongyang, is mostly a shambles. North Korea has few funds for building and still uses power and rail lines built during Japan's 1910-1945 colonial rule.

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 mid-to-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.

REUTERS SBC KP1550