N. Korea Overstating Flood Damage to Attract Aid, U.S. Officials Say : Asia: Exaggerated estimates of losses signal Pyongyang’s intention to forgo self-reliance doctrine.

WASHINGTON —  In the most curious report yet on North Korea’s intention to abandon its doctrine of juche , or self-reliance, U.S. officials have concluded that the long-isolated Pyongyang regime has been wildly inflating the extent of recent flood damage so that it can attract food and other aid from abroad.

Over the last month, North Korean officials have characterized a series of recent floods as a catastrophe, maintaining that they caused about $15 billion in economic damage and eradicated nearly 2 million metric tons of food. The officials passed on these estimates to a United Nations team that visited North Korea last month.

But U.S. government specialists on North Korea, who have access to intelligence reports, have concluded that these claims of economic damage are exaggerated. The flood damage, they say, was largely confined to a single province, while the region of North Korea that produces most of the nation’s food was unaffected.

“I think what they [North Korean officials] are trying to do is to create a climate in which they can get as much international economic assistance as possible,” one U.S. official observed. American estimates are that North Korea’s food shortfall this year will be about the same as in the last few years.

North Korea’s handling of the floods is all the more surprising because only a few years ago it would have been likely to minimize or hide the impact of a natural disaster. The regime of the late President Kim Il Sung was eager to show that it could take care of itself without outside help.

Pyongyang’s apparent exaggeration of flood damage is merely the latest in a series of indications that North Korean officials are eager for aid from the West and from Japan. Last spring, well before the flooding, North Korea asked for emergency shipments of rice from Japan and South Korea.

Clinton Administration officials said North Korea has also quietly cooperated with U.S.-led efforts to clean up spent fuel from North Korean nuclear installations.

Aid from the West would help make up for the billions of dollars a year North Korea used to get from the Soviet Union and China.

The Soviet Union had been supplying North Korea with from $2 billion to $2.5 billion a year in aid in the years leading up to the Soviet collapse in 1991, according to U.S. estimates. Now, Pyongyang gets no more than $100 million to $200 million a year from Russia.

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Similarly, in the early 1990s, China supplied North Korea with as much as million a year through trade deals on favorable terms. But that help has plummeted to less than million a year since China began demanding hard currency in trade deals with North Korea two years ago.

“What you’re seeing is a change in North Korean strategy,” observed one U.S. government specialist on North Korea. “They realize that their ability to get more aid from their two former patrons has greatly diminished. And so they made a calculation to approach the Japanese and the South Koreans and the United Nations” for help.

U.S. officials said that, although a few areas in northwestern North Korea were deluged with more than twice as much rain as usual this summer, the main grain-producing areas in the eastern part of the country had ordinary rainfall.

North Korea has been saying that it lost about 1.9 million metric tons of food because of the floods, a figure that U.S. officials said would represent nearly 50% of the country’s annual food production.

Similarly, U.S. officials pointed out that North Korea’s estimate of $15 billion in economic losses from the floods would represent about three-quarters of the country’s gross national product, which in recent years has been about $20 billion a year.

“There indeed was a lot of flood damage in one North Korean province, but this does not account for three-quarters of their GNP,” one U.S. official said.

The four-member U.N. team that visited North Korea last month to assess the flood damage used the government’s figures for damage claims in its official report. “The mission had no means to independently verify these national estimates,” the U.N. team said.

A year ago, in a deal negotiated with the Clinton Administration, North Korea agreed to freeze its fast-developing nuclear program in exchange for supplies of fuel oil and for two relatively safe nuclear reactors that cannot easily be used to make the fuel for nuclear weapons.

Over the past few months, at least three teams from the U.S. Department of Energy and from private U.S. companies have visited the North Korean nuclear plant at Yongbyon to arrange for cooling and cleaning the water and canning the radioactive fuel that was produced by its reactors.

Recently, U.S. and North Korean officials have also taken new steps toward normal diplomatic relations by moving toward the creation of formal liaison offices in Washington and Pyongyang.

“All I can say is that right now, they [North Korean officials] are in an extremely cooperative mood,” one Clinton Administration official said.