Some groups have said that the reclusive communist state could be being driven back into famine by poor harvests and soaring global food prices.

And bitter foe the United States, at loggerheads with the North over its nuclear weapons ambitions, last week promised it 500,000 tons of food aid. “If the North makes a request, we can consider it and provide direct aid,” South Korean Foreign Minister Yu Myung-hwan told reporters. Even with a good crop, North Korea cannot produce enough food for its population, which is among the world’s poorest. An estimated 1 million died there in famine during the 1990s

“It is the government’s position that the food situation in the North is not yet an emergency that would require us to go ahead with an offer of aid,” Seoul Unification Ministry spokesman Kim Ho-nyoun said separately. His ministry estimates the secretive state’s harvest last year fell about 2.5 million tons short of the 6.5 million it needs. But it said reduced rations and outside aid meant a net shortage of about 1.2 million tons.

South Korean President Lee Myung-bak took office in February with a vow to link economic aid to progress by his prickly neighbor in giving up nuclear weapons. His government has said it would not withhold humanitarian aid for political reasons. But the North’s hostility to the conservative Lee government makes it unlikely that the Pyongyang leadership would swallow its pride by asking Seoul for help.

Dialogue between the two Koreas has all but stopped since Lee came to power. The North’s state media routinely ridicule him as a “diehard moneygrubber and a swindler” and “a foul pro-American sycophant”.

“Even when you do want dialogue, it is hard when the other side keeps cursing at you,” said one South Korean official.

Under previous liberal governments in Seoul, the North could expect about half a million tons of rice annually and massive fertilizer shipments, with few questions asked — the price the South was prepared to pay for stability of the Korean peninsula.

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