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Prisons in the hardline communist country are already jammed with inmates due to a surge in crimes driven by hunger, said Buddhist aid group Good Friends, which works in the North.
"The number of people dying of starvation in prisons has been increasing. They are most vulnerable to a food shortage," it said in its latest newsletter.
A US think tank, the Peterson Institute for International Economics, warned this month that the North is at risk of outright famine -- ten years after up to one million of its people died of starvation.
Good Friends last week reported that farmers were dying of starvation in villages near Sariwon in North Hwanghae province.
In April it said that even elite citizens in the capital have had state rations cut off for six months.
The ruling Workers' Party is now using its emergency funds to resume suspended rations in some big cities and factories amid concerns about riots, the latest newsletter said.
"Due to concerns about possible riots, the party used its funds to buy food for big cities and large factories," it quoted an unidentified party official in Pyongsong north of the capital as saying.
"Such steps were taken because the military has no more stockpiles, which were used last year to solve the country's food shortage."
Since the 1990s famine, North Korea has depended on foreign aid to help feed its 23 million people.
Floods last summer blamed partly on deforestation wiped out a significant portion of the harvest and the North has also been hard hit by the global rise in food prices.
South Korea in recent years had provided its neighbour with about 400,000 tonnes of rice and 300,000 tonnes of fertiliser annually in bilateral aid.
But Pyongyang has so far not asked Seoul for the aid amid rising cross-border tensions. It is angry at the new South Korean government's policy of linking economic assistance -- but not humanitarian aid -- to denuclearisation.
South Korean and US officials were to hold talks in Washington Tuesday on providing food aid.
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SKorean chief nuclear envoy heads for Beijing: officials
Seoul (AFP) May 13, 2008
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