North Korea is about three months away from a crisis in humanitarian terms, as a poor harvest and declining aid from neighbouring countries threaten to create dramatic food shortages, the World Food Programme warned yesterday. Tony Banbury, the WFP's regional director for Asia, told the Financial Times that, while such a crisis could be averted over the coming months, "there are no real actions being taken and no obvious solutions in the immediate horizon". North Korea is facing a food production shortfall this year of almost 1.7m tonnes, the highest since 2001. The prices of staple foods in Pyongyang, the capital, have doubled over the past year and are at their highest recorded levels since 2004. The country's rice and maize production fell by more than a quarter last year when floods struck during the peak growing season. Adding to these domestic woes, "right now no food is going into the country" from South Korea, which used to provide up to 500,000 tonnes a year, according to Mr Banbury. The recent switch to a conservative government in Seoul meant that "it has a new policy and there is a big question mark about how much food it will provide, if any", he added. Meanwhile, Mr Banbury said, the United Nations agency was also concerned because food imports from China were down "significantly". China has in the past guaranteed commercial exports on concessional terms to North Korea, but Beijing's priority is to contain surging food inflation at home. With rising world food prices, Pyong-yang would find it hard to afford normal imports. Finally, the WFP's own contribution has been seriously curtailed since 2006, after Pyongyang decided to reduce its reliance on such food assistance. In the year to August, the WFP will distribute 45,000 tonnes of food to North Korea, a 10th of what it used to provide before 2006. Lee Myung-bak, who was elected South Korean president in December, has criticised the so-called "sunshine policy" of previous liberal governments for being too soft on the Pyongyang regime. One of his pledges is to link aid to North Korea to genuine progress in the nuclear negotiations. However, Mr Banbury said yesterday that the WFP was in talks with Seoul to "work out an agreement for a WFP food assistance programme with generous donations from South Korea as the way to solve this problem". The WFP estimates that 6.5m North Koreans, a quarter of the population, suffer from food insecurity and that figure could rise quickly if rising food shortages are not addressed. Still, Mr Banbury said the country was not on the brink of a famine comparable with that in the mid-1990s.