It is the world's most secretive country, its "Eternal President" has been dead for more than a decade, it spends massive sums on its military, yet it cannot feed its own people. This is North Korea.

The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) has warned that the country is facing a humanitarian crisis with up to 6 million people needing help.

Aid agencies say the food shortages are similar to a decade ago when North Korea suffered one of the most destructive famines of the 20th century. No one knows how many people died but estimates range from 600,000 and 2 million people.

The shortages have been caused by years of economic mismanagement in the reclusive Stalinist state, combined with natural disasters. Political wrangles with key food aid donor South Korea have exacerbated the North's problems.

In 2007, torrential rains triggered some of the worst flooding in decades, ravaging farmland, destroying tens of thousands of homes and damaging roads. The flooding resulted in a poor harvest that has caused food prices to rocket and supplies to dwindle. The United Nations launched an appeal for almost $15 million following the floods.

The world has committed billions of dollars in food aid over the past decade, but comprehensive aid programmes have been hampered by government obstruction and international fears over North Korea's nuclear ambitions.

A critical issue is the restrictions the North places on aid workers' ability to check where the food ends up. WFP donors say monitoring is vital to ensure that aid is not diverted to the military or the ruling party which has been accused of appalling human rights abuses.

Aside from international aid channelled via the WFP, North Korea has also relied heavily on bilateral aid from China and South Korea, which do not insist on monitoring.

But the South turned off the tap in 2008 with a new government saying its future generosity would depend on Pyongyang's progress in abiding by an international nuclear pact and other political issues.

In 2008, the United States pledged to give 500,000 tonnes of food aid to North Korea - its first bilateral assistance in eight years. Distribution began in July after North Korea agreed to relax restrictions on aid agencies' ability to monitor deliveries in an unprecedented deal. See AlertNet's report Hungry North Korea opens doors to aid workers.

Things have not run entirely smoothly for the WFP since it launched emergency famine response operations in the mid-1990s.

The agency actually shut up shop in late 2005 after Pyongyang said it no longer needed emergency aid and wanted the organisation to switch to longer term development. In reality, the U.N. body was unhappy about proposed restrictions on its operations including its scope for monitoring distribution.

Aside from delivering food, the WFP had set up 19 factories producing fortified foods and started food-for-work programmes to improve North Korea's ability to feed itself. These had included flood control projects, irrigation systems, land reclamation and reforestation.

In June 2006, the two sides agreed on a scaled back programme with the WFP providing aid to 1.9 million people - down from the 6 million it had been helping in previous years.

Aid operations have been further hampered by a bitter row over North Korea's nuclear ambitions, which prompted the United States to brand it part of an "axis of evil".

South Korea temporarily suspended regular aid in 2006 after Pyongyang test-fired seven missiles in July. The same month the country was again hit by major storms that led to flooding that killed hundreds and displaced tens of thousands.

In October, North Korea announced it had carried out an underground nuclear test, prompting condemnation around the world. The U.N. Security Council promptly passed sanctions.

International funding for food aid dropped almost immediately, even though the sanctions excluded humanitarian relief. Analysts and aid workers began warning that the country was slipping back into a famine.

The reduced WFP programme, focusing on children and pregnant and nursing women, found itself critically underfunded, able to feed only 700,000 of the targeted 1.9 million.

Six-nation talks in early 2007 yielded an agreement from Pyongyang to take steps towards nuclear disarmament in exchange for $300 million in aid. The deal offered North Korea economic and energy aid if it declared all its nuclear programmes and disabled nuclear facilities.

Seoul announced it planned to resume fertiliser shipments to the North in time for spring sowing. In September 2007, U.S. President George W. Bush also authorised $25 million of the promised energy aid as a reward for North Korea's moves towards dismantling its nuclear weapons programme.

Following the 2007 summer floods, WPF launched an emergency food distribution, targeting some 215,000 affected people. It continues to stress that long-term foreign aid is required.

China and South Korea have given hefty amounts of grain and fertiliser directly to North Korea over the years, but critics say the negligable monitoring is undermining efforts to improve transparency.

In 2008, South Korea's new president, Lee Myung-bak, warned Pyongyang that if it wanted more aid it must improve human rights, abide by an international nuclear deal and start returning Southerners kidnapped or held since the 1950-53 Korean War.

Some North Korea watchers have queried whether the world should be giving aid at all if it means extending the life of a despotic regime and whether aid is just prolonging the very policies that led to famine in the first place.

"We have to pose the question whether through giving humanitarian aid we are at the same time reinforcing perhaps the worst political regime on the planet...," former Czech President Vaclav Havel said in the introduction to Hunger and Human Rights, The Politics of Famine in North Korea, a 2005 report by the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea.

Defectors have told horrific stories of human rights violations. These include labour camps for anyone who falls foul of the system. Refugees have described forms of torture, public executions, forced abortions and campaigns to kill disabled babies. Former prisoners have told how they survived by catching and eating rats.

In 2005, 1,387 North Koreans made their way to the South, according to South Korea's Unification Ministry. The figure in 2004 was 1,894. Almost all come through China.

Estimates of the number of North Koreans in China range from 30,000 to 300,000. China, which fears instability if large numbers flood across the 1,400km (850-mile) border, has been criticised for deporting migrants back to North Korea.

Although many of those fleeing are economic migrants, the United Nations says the persecution they are likely to face if they return means they merit protection under international law.

The former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, once described Kim Jong-il as a tyrannical dictator who lived like royalty while jailing hundreds of thousands and keeping many hungry in a "hellish nightmare".

North Korea calls itself a people's paradise and says criticism of its human rights is motivated by those wanting to topple Kim's leadership.

The worst of the famine was a decade ago, yet North Korea still relies heavily on outside assistance to feed its people. So how did the country end up in this mess?

Pyongyang points the finger at a series of natural catastrophes but this is not the whole story.

After World War Two the Korean peninsula split in two. The U.S.-backed Republic of Korea proclaimed sovereignty in the South and the Soviet-backed Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) did the same in the North.

The North invaded the South in 1950 hoping to unify the peninsula. The conflict ended with an armistice in 1953. Since then South Korea has grown into one of Asia's most affluent countries, while the North has slid into poverty.

The man who shaped North Korea was its founding father Kim Il-sung who introduced a philosophy of juche, or self-reliance. But this strategy has caused major problems given that only 18 percent of the land is arable and the climate is less than favourable.

Despite its commitment to self-sufficiency, North Korea actually relied heavily on its socialist allies for products including fertiliser and insecticides. With the collapse of the Soviet Union it found itself in dire straits.

Although China continued to supply petroleum and food, this was no match for the help once received from the Soviet Union. And China itself was changing and increasingly wanted hard currency for its exports.

Food is distributed through two channels in North Korea. Farm workers get an annual grain allowance while the bulk of the population receives regular rations through the public distribution system (PDS). As outside assistance fell, so did the rations. In 1991, the government initiated a "Let's eat two meals a day" campaign.

Kim Il-sung died in 1994 and was succeeded by his son, Kim Jong-il. The succession marked the only time in history that rule of a communist state has passed from a father to a son. However, Kim Il-sung has been declared the country's "Eternal President".

Death rates in North Korea were rising by 1994, if not earlier, according to the Hunger and Human Rights report.

By the spring of 1995 the situation had grown desperate enough for Pyongyang to ask Japan and South Korea for emergency assistance. But things were about to get worse.

In the summer the country was hit by floods. The effects were exacerbated by soil erosion and river silting caused by previous deforestation that was the result of North Korea's efforts to increase cultivation. There were more floods in 1996 followed by a series of weather-related difficulties.

But as aid began arriving in North Korea, the country took the curious step of reducing its commercial imports, diverting the money it saved to other priorities including the military, according to the Hunger and Human Rights report.

In 1999, at the same time as it was cutting grain imports, it spent scarce foreign exchange on 40 MiG-21 fighters and eight military helicopters from Kazakhstan, the report's authors say.

"Times would have been tough under almost any policy, but a famine killing 3-5 percent of the population was not pre-ordained," they say.