IN North Korea, the trains have mostly stopped running, the postal system has broken down, there is no paper for school hooks and the dead are buried in rented coffins.
The communist country has slipped into a torpid state where the infrastructure of daily life has disintegrated, according to ethnic Koreans living in China who have access to relatives inside North Korea, which is closed to the foreign media.
In two days talking to residents in Yanji, a city of 370,000 people in China's northeastern Jilin Province where most people are ethnic Korean, I met a number who said North Korean relatives had died from starvation.
"To be quite frank, it's worse than Zaire. Many are dying from a long drawn out hunger. There isn't a family that doesn't have somebody sick," said a professor of Korean studies who asked that his name not be published so he could speak frankly.
"My aunt died in North Korea in February," he said. "Her son lives 50 kilometres away but he did not know for 14 days because the post doesn't work. The neighbours rented a coffin to go to the cemetery to bury the remains. Then they returned the coffin."
People under 62 are buried at night, he said, so they are not counted among the famine statistics by a regime which is trying to deceive itself and the world. No one knows the correct figure. In April, North Korea admitted to 137 deaths from hunger last year. A top Chinese official in Yanji told a Korean journalist unofficially that the true figure was 120,000.
Ironically, while North Korea starves, Jilin Province has an overabundance of maize, millet, rice, sorghum, soybeans, sweet potatoes and vegetables. "We had our best ever harvest last year," said Yanji's vice mayor, Mr An Shiguang.
The city's director of planning, Mr Jin Long Qi, told me: "Last year, grain production reached 23,063 tonnes and vegetables 58,160 tonnes. Some of the grain would be rotting in warehouses if we did not send it to other parts of China." The surplus was not sent directly to starving North Koreans because that was a "state to state matter".
Just across the border, people are reduced to eating tree hark and "everything which grows except noxious weeds".
"They mix chicken feed with salt water and boil it," said a customs official whose husband's brother in law died from hunger.
The crop this year will he a disaster again because of inferior seed and lethargy, said a Yanji academic who is researching conditions in North Korea. "When seed is planted, people come the next day and dig it up and eat it."
"They eat flesh," said a shop assistant in a matter of fact manner, pinching her arm. Yanji is full of rumours of cannibalism across the border, which cannot be substantiated.
The professor said, however: "I heard two brothers were executed after they killed a man and sold the meat. I believe there were cases during the winter when the ground was frozen and the flesh of bodies did not rot quickly."
Factories are at a standstill. Many people don't wear socks because the sock factory has closed. Mining has almost ceased and, consequently, the Tumen river on the border is free from pollution for the first time in memory.
Miners' monthly wages have been cut from 90 yuan (£8.50) to 30 yuan a month, he said, but "they go to work because they get a free lunch and once a month their wives get five kilograms of maize". No rations have been issued to North Koreans for a year, said his colleague, also an ethnic Korean researcher, except on the birthday of state founder, Kim Il Sung, in April when each family received three kilos of maize, enough for a week.
"The young people are growing up smaller than their parents and 20 year old women look like 12 year old girls," he said. Indoctrination is also being stepped up. "Even workers' wives must attend indoctrination political sessions where officials tell them the famine is the result of natural disaster."
Floods partially destroyed the Korean harvest for two years running, coinciding with aid drying up after the end of the Cold War.
At the border town of Tumen, blue Chinese trucks could be seen crossing into North Korea piled with unmarked sacks of grain. In another irony, grain from Jilin Province being exported to Japan is trucked through the North Korean countryside where people are dying.