By Steven Mufson and John Pomfret
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, April 6, 1998; Page A18

Aid officials are expressing increasing concern over widening food shortages and hunger in the isolated Stalinist state of North Korea. But despite the reports, the hard-line Communist government has continued to haggle with two of its biggest food donors, the United States and South Korea, over the monitoring of food shipments by international aid workers.

"The situation is getting worse and worse among the general population," said Doug Coutts, head of the World Food Program in the North Korean capital of Pyongyang, in a telephone interview. Although Coutts said he believes North Korea is "not in a famine situation yet," he said mortality rates have risen sharply as many people, weak from being underfed, die of diseases they might otherwise have survived.

Other groups, including the Washington-based evangelical Christian charity World Vision, suggested that large numbers of people are dying. The South Korea-based Buddhist Sharing Movement surveyed 472 North Korean "food refugees" late last year and early this year in China and estimated that between 24 percent and 32 percent of their immediate family members had died as a result of a shortage of food. Most succumbed to disease, the movement's report said, adding that the refugees came from a wide range of North Korean cities.

The World Food Program reported in March that North Korea's grain stocks will be near depletion by late this month or early May.

Events in North Korea are affected by the government's unpredictability and the tense relationship with South Korea. More than 30,000 U.S. troops are stationed near South Korea's border with the North to protect the democratic South.

Mismanagement, failure to reform North Korea's autarchic economic system, bad weather and the collapse of the Soviet Union, North Korea's biggest trading partner, shoved North Korea into an economic tailspin after 1989.

For three years it has been unable to feed itself, sparking fears that its huge army might attack the South. Last month it announced a military alert and the beginning of military exercises of unspecified duration.

Since 1995, an international effort led by the World Food Program has delivered more than 825,000 tons of food to North Korea. China is believed to donate or sell 1.1 million tons a year, a U.S. official said.

The United Nations has issued a $415 million appeal for North Korea this year. The World Food Program is administering more than 90 percent of that, or 724,000 tons worth about $387 million. The program has targeted 7.2 million of North Korea's most vulnerable people -- mostly the young -- out of total population of about 23 million. So far, it has raised 220,000 tons from the United States and $20,000 from the Czech Republic, and South Korea plans to give 55,000 tons separately.

As part of an agreement signed with Pyongyang on Feb. 23, the food program almost doubled last year's 385,000-ton appeal on the condition that the North allow the program to increase the number of international monitors from about 20 to 46 and that they visit every area where the program's food was being distributed.

North Korea allows the program to monitor relief activities in only 150 of the 187 counties where food is distributed. The North also blocks foreign access to Rangang and Chagang provinces in the northeast, where food shortages are believed to be the most severe.

The U.S. government also has urged North Korea to allow more American aid workers access to the North. Last year, Pyongyang allowed only five American workers to monitor a shipment of 55,000 tons of food from the United States that was funneled through aid agencies. Only non-Korean speaking officials were allowed, they had to travel together and their visas were of limited duration, making complete monitoring impossible.

Last Tuesday, the North Korean government pulled out of a meeting with five U.S.-based charities to discuss efforts to monitor 83,000 tons of food pledged by the United States for this year. Western aid officials said a death in the family of one North Korean participant was Pyongyang's stated reason for its failure to show up.

"Unless North Korea opens up and allows people in to see the extent of the damage, there will be more and more skepticism about North Korea's needs," said a senior Clinton administration official. "And that skepticism is turning into donor fatigue."

On March 27, after three days of talks in Beijing and months of wrangling elsewhere, Pyongyang finally agreed to let the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies oversee the delivery of 55,000 tons of food donated by South Korea. North Korea had demanded that its own team monitor the deliveries, while South Korean Red Cross officials were worried that the donations would be used to feed the North Korean military.

The controversy over the monitoring of aid for North Korea underscores the general confusion in the West about events in the radical communist country. Western and South Korean organizations have pressed North Korea to allow more access to determine the extent of the problem.

"Either they are disguising a famine of massive proportions or they are manipulating us for their own political purposes and creating a famine that doesn't exist," said Andrew Natsios, vice president of World Vision, who believes that the former scenario is unfolding. "We need access so we can understand the gravity of North Korea's plight."

Coutts said the daily food ration in North Korea was slashed recently from an already paltry range of 15.75 to 17.5 ounces a day, which Coutts said is the "minimum needed" for an adult, to between 7 and 10.5 ounces a day. The rations are distributed by the Public Distribution System, which cut rations last year, too, but Coutts said the cutback happened a month earlier this year.

Mufson reported from Beijing, Pomfret from Washington.