Ms Niamh O'Carroll of Trocaire became the first Westerner to be shown the damage wreaked by Typhoon Winnie on North Korea's remaining farmland last week. The storm smashed miles of sea-walls, covered thousands of acres of farmland with salt water and flooded coal mines. "The rice paddies are under a couple of metres of sea water, and the husks are all empty," said Ms O'Carroll in Dublin yesterday. "All the people's houses were swept away, and their livelihood destroyed. We were told it would take four years for the soil to recover."
Typhoon Winnie is the latest in a series of natural calamities to afflict the country in the past few years. Hailstorms in 1994 and floods in 1995 and 1996 have pushed millions of North Koreans to the brink of starvation. Trocaire and An Post today begin an appeal for funds to help the country.
Donations can be made through any post office.
Ms O'Carroll and a colleague, Ms Mary Healy, spent a week in North Korea monitoring the distribution of almost 4,000 tonnes of rice donated by Trocaire. The rice, enough to feed 100,000 people for three months, was bought with the proceeds of an appeal which has raised almost £1 million so far.
According to Ms O'Carroll, the rice is being distributed fairly and efficiently. As petrol is virtually unobtainable in North Korea, trucks have been converted to steam power, fuelled by charcoal, to bring the rice-sacks from the port at Nampo to the rural districts where it is being distributed.
Their visit revealed further evidence of the collapse of one of the world's last communist outposts. "The place is disintegrating," she said. "Factories are closed, people are working the land everywhere you look. People are trying to grow things to eat - aubergine, radish, pumpkin and maize are the staples - on every bit of land they can find, as well as between the balconies of the high-rise buildings and even on the roof.
"For their whole lives they've been brought up on this doctrine of juche - self-sufficiency. And now they're clearly not self-sufficient. I saw lots of people picking grass in the cities. At first I was told they had rabbits to feed but later I learned it was to feed themselves. They're dividing everything up but, when there's nothing left to divide out, what do you do?"
Doctors in one hospital proudly showed the Irish pair around their eye-and-ear, neurosurgery and heart surgery departments. "But then it emerged there was no electricity, no running water, no food, no medicine. In the children's ward, they are all malnourished and they look at you with vacant eyes. You guess their age and they turn out to be twice as old. I'll never forget one seven-year-old, a little boy wearing blue pants and a blue T-shirt. All he is is ribs and arms and a big head and big unblinking eyes. He's so tiny, I can't believe he's that old." With winter on its way next month, temperatures are set to plummet to -40 C. Yet the hospital has no panes of glass, no blankets, no electricity, no fuel. Trocaire is desperately trying to source blankets in Hong Kong to send to North Korea.
A consignment of high-energy biscuits arrived last weekend, and a palm oil shipment is due to arrive shortly.
The World Food Programme estimates that North Korea will need 2.6 million tonnes of grain from the international community in order to stave off starvation this year.
According to Ms O'Carroll, there is some evidence that the normally closed regime is opening up a little to the West. North Korean agriculturalists have travelled to the United States for training, while a group of economists are studying the capitalist economy in Australia. US army personnel have been allowed in to search for the remains of their colleagues killed in the Korean War during the 1950s.
Nonetheless, North Korea continues to exist in a time-warp, closed off from the rest of the world. Ms O'Carroll's guide and translator didn't know who the Beatles were, though he was able to sing Danny Boy in Korean.