N. Korean Famine Filmed Cbs News Crew Documents Widespread Drought, Starvation

A CBS crew that flew into North Korea on a privately sponsored relief flight documented widespread human devastation from famine, including dead bodies lying along railroad tracks and an orphanage filled with emaciated babies.

The crew entered North Korea with the organization Americares on what the network described as the first civilian flight from U.S. soil allowed into the country since the end of the Korean War, CBS said Sunday.

The footage also shows stunted corn fields, abandoned rice paddies and lines of people waiting for relief which turned out to be nothing more than herbal tea leaves.

The report by Peter Van Sant will be shown on the premier episode of “Public Eye with Bryant Gumbel” Wednesday. Van Sant reports that babies, orphaned because their parents were either dead from starvation or too weak to care for them, are so malnourished they are battling life-threatening infections.

The secretive country is generally off-limits to Westerners. In August, CNN aired footage from North Korea taken by its president of international networks, Eason Jordan, who flew in on a commercial flight from Beijing with the permission of North Korean authorities.

Using a small digital video camera, he reported on the status of the drought there. CNN also recently had a crew providing pool coverage of the opening of a nuclear plant in the country.

International aid organizations say 5 million North Koreans - nearly a fifth of the population - will die of starvation without outside aid after three years of devastating harvests.