"Major sources of food for North Korea are all going down and there is no very good prospect that any will go up soon," said Tony Banbury, the regional director in Asia for the WFP.

This year's food shortfall is projected to be 1.66 million metric tons, about double the need of last year and the highest since 2001, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.

The fast-worsening food situation in the closed-off Communist country - where staple food prices have doubled in the past year - is the result of what U.N. officials describe as a pernicious confluence of flood-damaged local harvests, soaring world food prices and an unexpectedly sharp drop in aid from neighboring South Korea and China.