About 8 percent of North Korean children are suffering from acute malnutrition, according to Danielle Deboutte, a Belgian physician and health project officer with UNICEF's office in Pyongyang.
"The most important assistance for North Korea is food," Deboutte said in a recent interview.
In the midst of growing regional and global tensions related to North Korea, which have hampered some assistance to the communist state, the poverty-stricken country continues to have problems feeding its people, partly as it channels a good deal of its resources to the military.