North Korea is facing a chronic and worsening food crisis, according to an aid group which has experience of working inside the secretive state.
The Good Friends aid agency, based in South Korea, says rations have been cut severely, badly affecting even elite citizens in the capital, Pyongyang.
Good Friends says that to protect its sources, it cannot reveal where its latest information has come from.
But previous reports from the group on North Korea have later been confirmed.
Good Friends - a Buddhist-affiliated group that takes food and other aid into North Korea - says the crisis is most serious in rural areas, with people in many parts of South Hwanghae province living without rations since November.
Rations cut
But privileged medium- and lower-level officials based in Pyongyang are also said to have received no rations this month; they had already been cut by 60% in February.
Earlier this month, Good Friends said it had received evidence that 15 North Koreans had been publicly executed for illegally crossing the Chinese border in search of food.
The World Food Programme has warned that almost a quarter of North Korea's 20 million people is suffering from a severe lack of food.
Soaring international grain prices are making the situation much worse.
WINDHOEK, March 20 (Reuters) - North Korea's number two leader on Thursday started a three-country African tour in Namibia, a leading uranium producer with longstanding ties to the reclusive communist state.
Kim Yong-nam, president of the presidium of the Supreme People's Assembly, will officially open Namibia's new North Korean-built presidential residence and discuss trade and political relations, Namibian officials said.
They declined to say whether cooperation on uranium enrichment would be discussed with North Korea, under international pressure to abandon its nuclear weapons programme in exchange for aid.
Namibia is the world's fifth-largest uranium miner and recently announced it would develop plans to enrich locally mined uranium in conjunction with the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
Kim will hold talks with President Hifikepunye Pohamba and predecessor Sam Nujoma, whose struggle to overthrow the rule of apartheid South Africa won the backing of North Korea and other communist states.
North Korea established diplomatic relations with Namibia when it won independence under Njoma in 1990.
An expert on North Korea at Korea University in Seoul, Yoo Ho-yeol, noted that Kim's visit could be meant to further diplomatic ties and also boost economic cooperation.
BUSINESS
"More than anything else, business is a major issue for North Korea when it comes to diplomacy. You could say North Korea is always looking for ways to see if it could sell things that it's got, not necessarily weapons," he said.
The top U.S. negotiator with North Korea said on Wednesday Pyongyang is not yet ready to provide an accurate description of its nuclear programs but he expects them to do so eventually.
A 2005 accord under which North Korea agreed to abandon all its nuclear programs in exchange for economic and diplomatic benefits has been bogged down by Pyongyang's failure to produce a declaration of its nuclear programs by the end of last year.
The North Korean delegation will leave Namibia on Sunday for visits to neighbouring Angola and Uganda, the information ministry said.
Kim's visit to Namibia came in for criticism from local human rights activists and newspapers.
The National Society for Human Rights said its reservations about the visit should be seen in line with opposition to "the systematic and gross human rights violations occurring in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea."
Namibian newspapers also questioned the visit.
"An invitation of this nature to North Korea is hardly going to attract the investment community to our country. Indeed, it will be perceived as a sign of backwardness, and surely quite rightly so," the Namibian said in an editorial.
(Additional reporting by Jack Kim in Seoul; writing by Marius Bosch; Editing by Matthew Tostevin)
