A drought in North Korea could lead to huge food shortages this year, the top UN official in the country has told journalists in an interview.
Rainfall in 2014, the lowest in records going back 30 years, was 40-60 percent below 2013 levels, and reservoirs are very low, said Ghulam Isaczai, the UN resident coordinator. If El Nino weather conditions bring more drought this year, the situation in 2016 could be even worse, he warned. A famine in the 1990s killed as many as 1 million North Koreans but recently many international donors have been reluctant to help because of Pyongyang's restrictions on humanitarian workers and international concerns over its nuclear ambitions.
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