145;North Korea back on the brink of famine146;

North Korea has fallen into a grain deficit that has caused food prices to shoot up, its citizens to die from a lack of food and pushed the impoverished state to the brink of famine, a study obtained on Tuesday said. The problem has been exacerbated by donors cutting food and fertiliser aid in response to Pyongyang ratcheting up security concerns, according to the study by Marcus Noland and Stephan Haggard for the US-based Peterson Institute for International Economics.