India has provided food aid to impoverished North Korea, the countryÂ’s state media said Tuesday, in an apparent move to help ease chronic food shortages. The Korean Central News Agency said that a presentation ceremony was held at a North Korean port. The brief report did not give any details on the amount of aid. The North has relied on foreign handouts to feed its 23 million people for more than a decade after natural disasters and mismanagement devastated its economy in the mid-1990s. Famine is believed to have killed 2 million people. One North Korean rail worker was shot to death last month in Haeju city, south of Pyongyang, as he was stealing rice from a cargo train at a railway station, according to Good Friends, a South Korean aid group. The private group, which provides humanitarian aid to the North, declined to say how it obtained the information, citing its sensitivity. Some of the groupÂ’s previous reports regarding the North have later been confirmed.
The World Food Program has recently predicted North Korea will fall some 1.4 million tons short of its food needs this year, because of last yearÂ’s flooding triggered by the heaviest rainfall in 40 years. The floods, which left some 600 people dead or missing, also destroyed more than 11 percent of the countryÂ’s crops, according to North KoreaÂ’s state media.