North Korea has drastically cut public food handouts as it heads towards a new hunger crisis with people again eating grass to survive, one of the most experienced aid workers in the nation said.

Food rations have been cut to as low as 150 grams (5.3 ounces) a day per person in some parts of the country as foreign donations collapse and higher international prices make imports more expensive, said Katharina Zellweger, head of a Swiss government aid office in Pyongyang.

At the same time, Zellweger, who has been active in North Korea for 15 years, said there are definite signs of change.

A new moneyed middle class is emerging while the strictly regimented state had lauded a new "mini-MBA" run by her agency using Hong Kong teachers.

Food supplies to the estimated population of 23 million people have been controlled through a public distribution system for decades.

"It works sometimes and sometimes it doesn't work," the head of the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation office in Pyongyang told a group of UN correspondents.

"The lowest I heard was 150 grams per person per day, and I even heard that in Pyongyang the rations are cut to 200 grams per person per day."

Diplomats say the rations have been halved over the past 18 months. One hundred grams of rice produces about 250-350 calories a day, experts said.

Zellweger said she had seen "a lot more malnourished children" on recent travels around the country.

"You see more people out in the fields and on the hillsides digging roots, cutting grass or herbs. So there are signs that there is going to be a crisis."

North Korea went through a famine in the late 1990s in which hundreds of thousands died of hunger.

"What we had this year is many small shocks which is building up to new crisis. What I think is the question we are all grappling with, is when is the tipping point? When does the situation shift from chronic malnutrition to acute malnutrition?"

Zellweger said that "a long, miserable cold winter" had badly hit spring crops and potato seedlings. This has compounded reduced foreign aid as North Korea faces a hardline attitude from the rival South Korea and the United States over its nuclear weapons program.

The United States has demanded proof that food aid will not be misused before it resumes shipments. South Korea used to provide up to 350,000 tons a year of fertilizer. This stopped in 2007.

(Source: AFP)