SEOUL - NORTH Korea will never appeal to South Korea for badly needed food aid even at the risk of growing starvation, a Seoul-based humanitarian group said on Tuesday.

'We are ready to risk the lives of our people,' the Good Friends group quoted an unidentified official of the ruling Workers' Party as saying.

'It is our position that (North Korea) will not collapse even if our people die. Nobody talks about aid from South Korea because it offends us too much.'

Good Friends, which operates in the North, said authorities would launch a sweeping campaign in June to tighten ideological controls amid widespread public anger at the lack of food.

The agency, which did not give the source of its information, said deaths from starvation were now being reported from nearly all 20 cities and counties in South Hwanghae province - the rice belt which was badly damaged by floods last year.

People are also dying in other provinces but South Hwanghae is the worst hit, it said.

Some foreign analysts believe the North is approaching another famine, a decade after up to one million people died of starvation.

Washington last week promised food aid shipments totalling 500,000 tonnes but Seoul has not outlined any plans of its own to help its neighbour.

The North has cut ties with President Lee Myung Bak's conservative government in protest at its firmer line linking economic aid to progress on denuclearisation.

Mr Lee's government says it will still offer unconditional humanitarian aid but the North must first ask for it.

However Foreign Minister Yu Myung Hwan said on Monday the South could send food even without being asked if its neighbour faces a 'very serious situation'. Good Friends said Pyongyang is determined to sacrifice its people for the survival of its regime.

Yonhap news agency has also reported that the North will not ask the South for aid.

'If South Korea provides food, North Korea has no reason not to accept it. But North Korea will never ask for it first,' it quoted a source as saying after meeting officials in Pyongyang.