Lack of international aid to the famine-stricken country has left some elderly, women and children in a desperate situation during the harsh Korean winter, the United Nations agency said.

"We are scrapping the bottom of the barrel," WFP representative for North Korea Masood Hyder said at a press conference in Beijing.

"Over four million core benfeciaries, the most vulnerable elderly, women and children are now deprived of very vital rations. It is the middle of the harsh Korean winter and they need more food not less."

The WFP has targetted 485,000 tonnes of commodities valued at 171 million dollars for 2004 but has so far only secured commitments for 140,000 tonnes and little of this has actually been delivered.

The United States, Australia, Canada and the European Union recently pledged 77,000 tonnes of aid but this will not arrive before April.

Only 75,000 pregnant women and 8,000 children in orphanages and hospitals will receive cereal from the WFP in February and March and even this group is suffering.

Hyder cited as an example expectant women who over the course of their pregnancies would be expected to gain 10 kilograms (22 pounds), but in North Korea most women gain only five kilograms (11 pounds), even with help.

"A lady I visited who I thought was three or four months pregnant was in fact full term and about to give birth," said Hyder, adding she was already being helped.

The funding crisis is also forcing a drastic scale back of food-for-work activities while WFP-assisted factories producing enriched foods are threatened with closure due to a shortage of donor-supplied ingredients.

"Many of those we cannot help only consume two thirds of the calories they need," he said. "Unless they get help very soon the damage will be irreparable."

Although the agency only has a partial picture of the situation in North Korea, there is evidence that the level of nutrition has risen dramatically and Hyder said these gains must not be thrown away.

"Painstaking gains made in improving nutritional standards since the late 1990s risk being reversed. That must not happen," he said.

The WFP dishes out an average of 250 to 300 grammes of cereal per day to North Koreans involved in its aid programme, about half of people's daily ration. The rest is provided by a national distribution scheme.

Hyder blamed the funding shortfall on a precarious political environment and donor fatigue with a country which has received food aid for nine years.

In other countries, the WFP distributes food with the help of organizations such as the Red Cross and Salvation Army, but North Korea does not allow that, relying on its own public distribution system instead.