Beyond the propaganda:

'North Koreans quietly starving'

S Korea: While North Korea prepares a lavish funeral forlate leader Kim Jong-Il, outside the showpiece capital people are struggling to survive and so hungry they even eat grass, observers say.

Since Kim's body was laid out in a glass coffin, official television has shown a procession of smartly-dressed, well-fed members of the country's privileged elite paying their respects.

But away from the television cameras, whose lenses are largely focused on Pyongyang, many North Koreans are trapped in poverty, malnourished or even starving to death, according to aid workers and defectors.

The system of centralised food rationing has crumbled and the country has been blighted by frequent weather-related crop failures, leaving it heavily dependent on foreign aid deliveries.

"Food distribution in Pyongyang cannot be compared to other places because it is the face of North Korea," said Yeom Kwang-Jin, a defector with the South Korea-based organisation Durihana which helps refugees from the North.

"In other places food distribution had completely stopped, while in Pyongyang people get a small amount. People turn to the black market to survive."

Kim Jong-Il presided over a 1990s famine that saw hundreds of thousands of people die, but still found the funds for a nuclear weapons programme. AFP