Chief nuclear negotiator Kim Sook also said a decade of engagement under previous liberal Seoul governments had largely been a failure.

He was speaking a day after the North threatened to cut all ties with the South in protest at what it termed a hostile policy by the new conservative government.

"The real solution to the chronic food shortage is North Korea's commitment to fundamental change. However, there is little sign the North is moving toward the right direction," Kim told a seminar in the southern island of Jeju.

He said "structural inefficiencies" had contributed to "massive malnutrition" which left children aged under 14 almost 14 centimetres (5.6 inches) shorter than their South Korean counterparts.

Kim said the current Seoul government had offered Pyongyang unconditional food aid but it had refused to respond to an offer of 50,000 tons of corn.

He described the food shortage as serious but said it was unlikely to become a full-blown famine, as in the mid- to late 1990s.

The South formerly provided the North with some 400,000 tons of rice a year but the North has not requested the aid this year as relations soured.

Pyongyang has already cut almost all exchanges in protest at conservative President Lee Myung-Bak's decision to link economic projects to progress in nuclear disarmament.

On Thursday the ruling communist party newspaper said Lee's administration was negating agreements at inter-Korean summits and pursuing confrontation and war with the North.

"If the group of traitors keeps to the road of reckless confrontation with the DPRK (North Korea), defaming its dignity despite its repeated warnings, this will compel it to make a crucial decision including the total freeze of the North-South relations," it said.

Early this month the North threatened to expel South Koreans from a joint industrial estate at Kaesong unless Seoul stopped defector groups floating leaflets across the border.

But two groups representing defectors and families of kidnapped South Koreans said Friday they would press on.

"We're going to float balloons carrying some 300,000 leaflets bearing the names of South Korean citizens and prisoners of war held in the North on three separate occasions this month from eastern waters," said defector Park Sang-Hak.

The North has for months blasted Lee as a "traitor" and "US sycophant."

Kim called for a halt to the "slanderous invective" and said the Seoul government would keep trying to forge a new relationship with Pyongyang.

Lee's liberal predecessors practised a decade-long "sunshine" engagement policy with the North which saw tens of millions of dollars spent on aid and cross-border projects.

But Kim said the economic gap had widened in the past decade, with the South now 18 times richer than the North in terms of gross national income compared with 13 times a decade ago.

"In short, our assistance and cooperation did not work well in bringing changes we had hoped for in North Korea," he said, adding that the North was unwilling to change its "military first" system to promote economic development.

Kim also forecast delays in six-nation negotiations to scrap the North's nuclear programme. "Pyongyang may engage in its salami tactics again, hoping to stretch the negotiation process as long as possible."

But it was "out of the question" for Seoul ever to recognise the North as a nuclear weapons state.

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