U.N. says North Korea unusually open about flood damage

By Mark Chisholm

PYONGYANG (Reuters) - North Korea has responded to outside help after devastating floods with unusual openness, a top U.N. official in the country said, but added providing assistance to the reclusive state was still a massive challenge.

Jean-Pierre de Margerie said the floods, which left at least 600 dead, had also left hundreds of thousands homeless and destroyed farmland and infrastructure, a blow to a country that faces chronic food shortages.

"The level of damage to infrastructure, to communications, to crops, to farmland and to households, is considerable," said de Margerie, who is the acting U.N. coordinator in North Korea as well as the World Food Programme's country representative.

"The breakthrough that happened with the floods a few weeks ago is that the government has improved its level of cooperation by giving us unprecedented access to the field to conduct our assessments of the damage," he said.

Keen to project an image of strength and suspicious of outside intervention, North Korea rarely calls for foreign help.

De Margerie said its appeal for aid this August was its first call in 12 years, since flooding in the 1990s led to a famine that some estimate killed as many as 2 million people.

It was too early to say whether North Korea could be facing renewed famine, de Margerie said, but added that the food security situation in the country was already precarious.

"This year, following these floods, we know that it's farmland, it's harvest that will be affected and we're concerned that the food deficit might actually be larger in 2007 than it has been for many years."