UN official says 83 dead in NKorea floods

United nations, Aug 17: Floods in North Korea have killed 83 people, left more than 300,000 homeless, destroyed 58,000 houses and drenched more than 90,000 hectares of farmland, a senior UN official said.

Another 60 people are missing in the storms that destroyed bridges, public buildings, pumping stations and power supplies, said Margareta Wahlstrom, the deputy UN relief coordinator yesterday.

She confirmed at a new conference Pyongyang's estimate of 300,000 homeless people.

North Korea, which has suffered chronic food shortages for years, said floods have ravaged crops in its agricultural bread basket and left more than 11 per cent of its paddy and corn fields submerged, buried or swept away.

Last year, North Korea produced 4.8 million tonnes of grain, and the rice crop accounted for half the total, according to the Korea Institute for National Unification.

Wahlstrom said North Korea still falls 1 million tonnes short of the food needed to feed its 23 million people. A famine in the mid- to late 1990s is estimated to have killed as much as 10 per cent of the population.

Specifically, a survey by UN relief agencies in the country said floods had damaged 30 reservoirs, 450 agriculatural structures, 800 public buildings, 540 bridges, 70 railroad sections and 500 high voltage towers and 30 reservoirs.

The heavy rains have also caused rivers to spill over in more than 800 places and damaged dikes in 10 areas, the United Nations said.

Assistance Welcome

UN agencies based in Pyongyang as well as European organizations and the International Federation of the Red Cross visited several provinces and counties this week.

Four southern provinces are the most affected. Wahlstrom estimated that 70 per cent of the arable land was damaged by the torrential rains in North Hwanghae province and half the health clinics were unusable.

''The government has welcomed assistance and we are now together with them defining what the needs will be,'' Wahlstrom told the news conference.

The most urgent, she said, was food, medical aid and emergency shelter.

Tomorrow, Wahlstrom said donor nations would meet in New York to see what ''resources we can mobilize.'' South Korea plans to send emergency items such as blankets, flour, instant noodles and medicine in an aid package that will be announced on Friday, the South's Yonhap news agency in Seoul quoted a government official as saying.

North Korea's economy shrank by 1.1 per cent in 2006 after seven years of growth, dragged down by heavy flooding that washed away crops last year and by international sanctions over a nuclear test in October, the South Korean central bank said.

Wahlstrom said the floods were similar to the heavy rains last year and in 2004, and that officials were still trying to determine whether they were as damaging as in 1995 when aid agencies found 500,000 people homeless.

The North Korean news agency KCNA reported that some streets in the capital were submerged in two meters (yards) of water, Pyongyang river parks were washed away and numerous people were killed in the city.

The secretive North has broadcast video of the flooding on its official television station, showing residents wading through waist-deep water in Pyongyang and troops being called out to repair the damage.

Reuters>