A U.S. congressman who recently visited North Korea said April 8 in Tokyo that he met with starving citizens there and witnessed a serious fuel shortage in the flood-stricken country.
"Everybody is systematically starving together," Tony Hall, a Democrat from Ohio, said at the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo. Hall called for increased international food assistance on humanitarian grounds despite widespread criticism of the North Korean government and other problems connected with the closed Stalinist state.
Floods devastated North Korea last summer for the second year in a row, destroying crops and leaving many fields covered with sand. Hall said food rations there have been cut to just 100 grams a day for many weeks, less than half of last August, when he previously visited the country.