Michael Tracy, a senior attorney with DLA Piper, which last month published a report into North Korean rights under Kim Jong-Il, said mismanagement of resources and environmental degradation made severe food shortages a certainty.

"Unless North Koreans change their policy, there will be another famine," Tracy said during a speech in Hong Kong. "It's not a question of if but when."

The report, commissioned by former Czech president Vaclav Havel, ex-Norwegian prime minister Kjell Bondevik and US Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel, said the human plight in the reclusive nation deserved to be treated on a parallel track with the security threat.

It painted a grim picture of a country in which rights abuses were common and where resource distribution was prioritised to support the military and leadership before the general population.

"The distribution system that favours select parts of society will ensure that many ordinary North Koreans will starve to death again," Tracy said.

According to reports from defectors, non-governmental organisations and other sources, about a million people, or five percent of the population of North Korea, died in the famine of 1995-1998.

The report argues that Kim's food policy, which sees some 25 percent of resources given to the military, is a rights abuse in itself and, along with the imprisonment of 400,000 people in gulags, is reason enough to press for UN action against Pyongyang.

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