Embassies ordered to approach foreign capitals directly as international food needs assessment gets under way

A mother feeding her child with special food provided by the World Food Programme in Pyongyang. Photograph: Gerald Bourke/AFP/Getty Images

North Korea has ordered all its embassies to appeal to foreign governments for food aid in a sign of growing desperation in Pyongyang, according to diplomatic sources.

This direct approach to foreign capitals, launched in December, is highly unusual for the insular and totalitarian regime, which normally negotiates deliveries of food assistance with international organisations such as the World Food Programme.

The WFP and the Food and Agriculture Organisation has begun a food needs assessment in North Korea, but the WFP said that last year it managed to raise only a fifth of the budget it needed for its North Korean aid programme.

That shortfall may be one of the reasons Pyongyang is trying a direct approach this year, observers said. But well-informed official sources in the region said that the regime was also having problems feeding the army, and wanted to build up a stockpile to fulfil promises of a "year of prosperity" in 2012 to mark 100 years since the birth of Kim Il-sung, the founding ruler of the Democratic People's Republic, and the 70th birthday of his son, the current leader, Kim Jong-il.

"This year, all 40 North Korean embassies have been ordered by Pyongyang to ask governments for food. They have each been given a quota," an Asian diplomat said.

Another Asian official said the order appears to have been given in December: "Kim Jong-il has told his embassies to get as much rice as possible."

In November the WFP and FAO warned that the majority of North Korea's people faced continued hunger this year after harvests were affected by unusually bad weather.

The Foreign Office confirmed that the North Korean embassy in London had approached the government seeking food aid.

"Any decision we make will be based on assessments currently being made of the country's food needs," a Foreign Office spokesman said.

The WFP/FAO needs assessment is expected to be published in the next few weeks. Marcus Prior, the WFP's spokesman in Asia, said: "North Korea has had a severe winter and a poor vegetable harvest and there could be an impact on the spring harvest."

A European official said he did not expect the evaluation to justify the declaration of a humanitarian crisis in North Korea, but Greg Barrow, a WFP spokesman in the organisation's Rome headquarters, said it was too early to judge the outcome.

"The mission got under way today. They are just going out in the field. Nobody knows yet what it will say," Barrow said. "We will distribute as much as we can get funding for, but at the moment we are 80% underfunded."

The WFP demands direct access to food distribution points in the North Korea countryside as a condition for handing over the food – something Kim Jong-il's secretive government has historically been reluctant to grant. Diplomatic sources suggested that this may be another reason the North Koreans are approaching foreign capitals directly.

North Korea has been hit by repeated famines in recent decades, particularly when bad weather has exacerbated the effects of inefficient collectivist farming practices and a shortage of mechanisation. The situation was particularly acute in the mid-1990s, when between 600,000 and more than 2 million people are believed to have died.

China, which has long served as North Korea's food supplier of last resort, faced its own food crisis as a result of a sustained drought, and that may have an impact on Beijing's food deliveries.

In last year's assessment of North Korean food needs, in the wake of a similarly severe winter, the WFP and FAO estimated the country had produced about 5 million tonnes of rice and other staples.

The state imported about 300,000 tonnes commercially, leaving a food deficit of half a million tonnes. However, the WFP's focus on children and pregnant and nursing mothers helped to ensure that overall rates of malnutrition declined. Anticipating that food production was likely to improve, the two UN food agencies recommended that the international community pay for another 305,000 tonnes to meet the needs of North Korea's 5 million most vulnerable people.

Pyongyang's isolation has deepened after the collapse of international talks aimed at persuading Kim Jong-il to curb his nuclear and missile programme. South Korea has also suspended all but emergency humanitarian deliveries after a string of incidents along the two countries' maritime border.

In November, North Korean forces shelled a South Korean island, Yeonpyeong, killing two marines, in one of the worst clashes since the Korean war ended without a peace treaty in 1953. The South's military was placed on its highest non-wartime alert.

Military talks aimed at defusing tensions between the two countries broke down on Wednesday, with no date set for any further meetings.