The World Food Programme (WFP) executive board has this week approved a new two-year operation for North Korea starting on July 1, WFP spokesman Marcus Prior said.
"It will target about 2.4 million people - almost all children, and pregnant and nursing women - with about 207,000 metric tons of food assistance at a cost of US USD 200 million," he said in an email to AFP.
The WFP will continue to focus on the nutritional needs of young children and their mothers through food which will be manufactured in the North using ingredients imported by the food body, he said.
In March, UN resident coordinator in North Korea Desiree Jongsma said timely imports from the WFP had contributed to avoiding a crisis this year but two thirds of the nation's 24 million population were still chronically food insecure.
Also Read
Nearly 28 per cent of children under five in the North suffer from chronic malnutrition and four percent are acutely malnourished, according to a UN national nutrition survey last year.
But the poverty-stricken country is still struggling to eradicate malnutrition and provide its people with vital protein, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization and WFP said.
North Korea suffered regular chronic food shortages under the Kim dynasty, with the situation exacerbated by floods, droughts and mismanagement. During a famine in the mid to late-1990s, hundreds of thousands died.
International food aid, especially that from South Korea and the United States, has been drastically cut over the past several years amid tensions over the communist state's nuclear and missile programmes.