SEOUL: North Korea, plagued by acute power and food shortages, will face a long hard winter with factory production coming to a near standstill if Washington gets its way to stop vital deliveries of oil to the communist state.

Officials of the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization will meet in New York later on Thursday to decide whether to stop oil deliveries to Pyongyang as punishment for a secret nuclear weapons programme which it revealed last month.

Analysts say the state’s dilapidated power plants are running at a little under a third of capacity with much of the hydro and coal production — the major fuels for power — out of action.

Oil, which fuels just seven per cent of total North Korean power production capacity, is keeping the system running and accounts for 15 per cent of current low power output, they say.

Most of North Korea’s 22 million inhabitants suffer long and frequent blackouts, but without oil, the state’s little industrial output will be under threat.

“The power shortage in North Korea is already severe. Factories are operating on a rotational basis and even government officials have held talks by candlelight in a top-class hotel,” said Kim Kyoung-sool, analyst at South Korea’s state-funded Korea Energy Economics Institute (KEEI).

“One or two months of delay might be okay, but a complete suspension of the oil deliveries would be a fatal blow.”

The United States and South Korea are in deadlock over fuel oil deliveries to Pyongyang under the 1994 Agreed Framework to supply North Korea with alternative fuels and build two lightwater reactors for power in exchange for the republic freezing its nuclear programme.

North Korea’s admission in October that it was enriching uranium for a nuclear weapons programme has put the 1994 pact in doubt, and Washington wants the oil supply line to be cut.

South Korea, the United States, Japan and the European Union are executive members of KEDO, which implements the 1994 Agreed Framework and supplies 500,000 tons of fuel oil to Pyongyang each year.

A US official said on Wednesday that Washington would press for a stop to oil deliveries, although it would agree to let one vessel already on the water from Singapore to deliver its load.

FLOODS, DROUGHT: South Korea’s Unification Ministry estimates its neighbour’s total power generation capacity at 7,550 megawatts, one-seventh of that in the south.