The Buddhist charity Good Friends has based its estimates on interviews with over 1,000 North Koreans living illegally in three provinces in China. Children and women are suffering particularly It estimates that there are at least a 140,000 refugees who have fled to China in search of food, and says that the figure could reach 300,000. They face being sent back to North Korea, where they are likely to be punished for leaving. The charity's president, the Venerable Pomnyun, said at the launch of their report, based on analysis of the interviews with refugees, that the death toll from the famine in the North had to be estimated at 3.5m people since 1995. Reliable figures hard to come by The charity's estimates are the highest yet.
Accurate statistics are very difficult to obtain from the isolated country.
Foreigners are denied access to most parts. North Korea released this picture of last year's missile Estimates are therefore often based on official North Korean figures. But experts disagree on whether North Korea's government uses artificially inflated figures in order to attract foreign help, or whether the regime tries to downplay the crisis by keeping the statistics unrealistically low. Pyongyang puts the death toll at 220,000. South Korea's national statistics office last week estimated that about 270,000 people have starved to death between 1995 and 1998.