North Korea admitted on Friday that hundreds of people are dead or missing after torrential rains swept the country, but international aid agencies say they are struggling to gauge the level of fatalities.
The official Korean Central News Agency reported that floods had also destroyed or damaged tens of thousands of buildings. It said the rains had left ”hundreds of people dead or missing in many parts of the country”. It was the secretive regime’s first public acknowledgement that people had died.
Heavy rains have caused widespread damage across the region. In China 482 people have died in floods caused by rains following Typhoon Bilis, the Xinhua news agency said. The storm has displaced almost three-million people and destroyed more than 210 000 homes, the agency added.
Torrential rain has killed at least 29 people in South Korea, and in Japan at least 15 people have died in floods and landslides triggered by the downpours.
The United Nations World Food Programme said it was willing to provide emergency food rations to North Korea as damage to crops meant it could suffer a repeat of the 1990s famines in which up to 2,5-million died.
The WFP was active inside North Korea for eight years until the end of 2005, when the regime forced it to suspend aid aimed at feeding 6,5-million people.
The agency has recently been given permission to resume activities on a smaller scale but says local red tape is hampering accurate damage assessment. The WFP said it would not release food unless it was allowed to make its own assessments and then monitor the aid once it reaches the affected areas. – Guardian Unlimited Â