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N. Korea flooding ruins farms

At least 200 people are dead or missing in the country's worst floods in a decade.

By TIMES WIRES
Published August 15, 2007

SEOUL, South Korea - Torrential rains in North Korea have forced thousands of families from their homes and left at least 200 people dead or missing, a Red Cross aid official said Tuesday, adding that the worst floods there in a decade will worsen the government's already precarious ability to feed its people.

To cope with damage from the storms that began last week, the North has asked the United Nations to assess the situation in affected regions as part of a preliminary request for assistance - an indication of the dire situation in the impoverished nation.

South Korea said it is considering offering emergency aid to its neighbor, although it has not received a formal request from the North.

Reports of the flooding in North Korea, a country that is chronically prone to floods and drought, came two weeks before President Roh Moo Hyun of South Korea was scheduled to meet North Korea's leader, Kim Jong Il, in Pyongyang on Aug. 28-30. With extensive parts of the North's farmland destroyed, economic aid will loom larger in the summit, the first in seven years.

North Korean state media reported that "hundreds" were dead or missing, without giving further detail on casualties.

"The material damage so far is estimated to be very big," the official Korean Central News Agency said Tuesday.

The agency said the heavy rains were known to have destroyed at least 800 public buildings, 540 bridges, 70 sections of railroads and 1,100 vehicles, pumps and electric motors.

Hardest hit provinces

Hardest hit were four agriculturally productive provinces in central and southern North Korea and Pyongyang, the capital, where some low-lying residential zones were inundated, according to a dispatch by Chosun Sinbo, a pro-North Korean newspaper in Japan.

North Korean officials told the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies that 200 people were dead or missing across the country, acting delegation head Terje Lysholm told the Associated Press from Pyongyang.

Lysholm said 63,300 families had been affected by the weather, which destroyed 30,000 homes. About 250,000 acres of farmland has also been washed away, he said.

"That really definitely has an impact on the food situation for this year and at least one or two years," he said. He said the floods were the worst seen in the North in at least a decade.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon, a South Korean, met with North Korea's U.N. ambassador, Pak Gil Yon, in New York to discuss the disaster and offer U.N. assistance.

In Washington, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the United States would also examine what it might be able to do to help the North Korean people.

Last summer, heavy floods also struck the North, but the exact number of dead was never revealed by the government. South Korea's main intelligence agency estimated that 800 to 900 people were killed or missing.

Information from the Associated Press and New York Times was used in this report.

[Last modified August 15, 2007, 01:43:05]