SEOUL: North Korea has one million tons of rice in store for its military despite its appeals for international food aid, a South Korean lawmaker said Thursday.
The rice reserve for emergencies stood at 300,000 tons for regular troops and 700,000 tons for reservists, Yoon Sang-Gyun of the ruling Grand National Party said in a statement.
"Some 300,000 tons are enough for the North's regular armed forces to continue war for 500 days," he said.
He said North Korea has also stored 1.5 million tons of oil and 1.7 million tons of ammunition for emergencies.
Yoon said his information came from intelligence authorities. The National Intelligence Service said it could not confirm this.
The legislator said the North's harvest last year increased slightly from a year earlier to 5.11 million tons.
But Pyongyang had asked other countries for aid so it can stockpile food for celebrations next year of the 100th anniversary of the birth of founding president Kim Il-Sung, he said.
The North suffered famine in the 1990s which killed hundreds of thousands and has relied partly on international food aid ever since.
But donations to UN programmes have dwindled due to international irritation at the North's missile and nuclear programmes. Seoul suspended its annual shipment of rice and fertiliser to its neighbour in 2008.
A senior Seoul official said separately that Pyongyang must accept responsibility for two deadly border incidents in return for better ties.
Chun Yung-Woo, senior presidential secretary for foreign affairs and security, said the communist state seeks food and fertiliser ahead of 2012, along with the lifting of sanctions and massive economic aid.
"It all depends on how the North makes up its mind. It should have the courage to overcome two thresholds," Chun told a forum on the North's economy.
The South says the North must take the blame for the sinking of a South Korean warship in March 2010, and for the shelling of a border island last November, before any high-level talks are held to ease tensions.
"We cannot just put them (the incidents) behind us as if nothing had happened," Chun said.
The North angrily denies responsibility for the ship's sinking with the loss of 46 lives. It says its island attack, which killed four South Koreans including civilians, was provoked by Seoul's artillery drill.
The second threshold would be the North's abandonment of its nuclear arsenal, which Chun said would open a "totally new world" for the isolated communist state, including its integration into the world community.
Yoon Duk-Min, of the Institute of Foreign Affairs and National Security, told the seminar the impoverished North's newly disclosed uranium enrichment plant must have cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
Yoon said its facilities are more advanced than those in Iran and Pakistan and estimated their cost at some $300-400 million.
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