Following successive poor harvests, the UN's World Food Programme (WFP) expects up to 40 percent of North Korea's population -- an estimated 8.7 million people -- will urgently need food aid in the coming months.

"We hope the international community will continue to remember the food crisis in the DPRK (North Korea). The humanitarian needs should not be overlooked by other events," the WFP's Beijing-based spokeswoman Lena Savelli told AFP ahead of Sunday's rocket launch.

"Right now is the lean season and we are still many months away from the next good harvest."

Last September, the WFP made a worldwide appeal for up to 504 million dollars of food aid for North Korea, but so far only 11 percent of that has been received, enough to feed about 1.8 million people.

"We had hoped to feed the most vulnerable, the elderly, kindergartens, pregnant women and hospitals," she said.

"But we are not able to give them full rations. We can only give them about 15 percent of what they need."

The situation is leading to malnutrition in pregnant women and stunted growth in children, she said.

Urban families are down to two meals a day and depending on relatives in rural areas to provide food.

Since a crop failure and famine in the mid-1990s, North Korea has become the biggest recipient of WFP aid in the world, while experts estimate millions of people have died of hunger over that period.

To make matters worse, North Korea last month refused to accept food from the United States, one of its main aid providers since the successive crop failures began.

Another key provider, South Korea, last year did not make its customary shipment of hundreds of thousands of tons of rice and fertiliser because the North failed to request the deliveries.

North Korea has repeatedly accused the United States, Japan and South Korea of hostile intentions and expressed fears that the three nations are seeking to overthrow the regime headed by Kim Jong-Il.

Pyongyang ratcheted up tensions in 2006 with separate tests of a ballistic missile and an atomic device.

Now it has launched what it says is a satellite, in what the United States and others say is a breach of a United Nations resolution.

"The bottom line is that North Korea suspects US intentions. The satellite launch shows this," said Shi Yinhong, an international relations expert at People's University in Beijing.

Yet even North Korea's main diplomatic and trade partner, China, appears to be cutting back on handouts.

According to China's customs bureau, about 124,000 tonnes of grain were shipped into North Korea last year, compared to earlier annual shipments of up to 500,000 tonnes.

In a report issued last month, the UN's special rapporteur on human rights in North Korea, Vitit Muntarbhorn, put the blame for the "dire and desperate" food situation firmly on the Pyongyang government.

"There have been some unconscionable developments with regard to the negative attitude of the authorities towards the general population," said Muntarbhorn.

"At the pinnacle there is an oppressive regime, bent on personal survival, under which ordinary people of the land undergo intolerable and interminable suffering," he said.

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