North Korean prisoners 'starving to death'
Updated
A South Korean aid group says prison inmates in North Korea are dying of starvation as the communist nation struggles with a food crisis.
Buddhist aid group Good Friends, which works in the North, says a proportion of those dying of hunger in North Korean jails were imprisoned on charges relating to stealing food to feed themselves.
"The number of people dying of starvation in prisons has been increasing. They are most vulnerable to a food shortage," it said in its latest newsletter.
The American think tank, the Peterson Institute for International Economics, has warned that North Korea is threatened with outright famine, a decade after up to one million of its citizens died of starvation.
Good Friends says it has reports of farmers in villages near Sariwon in North Hwanghae province dying of starvation.
It says even elite citizens in the capital Pyongyang have had their state rations cut off for six months.
The ruling Workers' Party is now using emergency funds to resume suspended rations in some cities and factories, to prevent riots over food shortages.
"Such steps were taken because the military has no more stockpiles, which were used last year to solve the country's food shortage," the group says.
Since the 1990s famine, North Korea has depended on foreign aid to help feed its 23 million people.
Floods last summer wiped out much of the harvest, and the global rise in food prices has reduced food affordability.
On Tuesday South Korean and US officials were preparing to hold talks in Washington on providing food aid to Pyongyang.
