SEOUL (AFP) - South Korea and the United States will hold talks next week on the food crisis facing North Korea, the foreign ministry said Friday, as an aid group reported that people were starting to die of hunger.

A South Korean diplomat will visit Washington on Monday for the talks, the ministry said.

"The government is willing to respond actively should there be a request for humanitarian aid from the North," said spokesman Moon Tae-Young.

A visiting US government delegation held talks in the impoverished communist country this week on possible emergency food aid.

Pyongyang said the talks had gone well "in a sincere atmosphere," while the US State Department said they were "inconclusive" in terms of ensuring that help will reach the neediest.

A leading US research institute warned last week that the North again runs the risk of outright famine, ten years after up to one million of its people died of starvation.

The Peterson Institute said food prices have almost tripled in the last year.

South Korean aid group Good Friends, which works in the North, said in its latest newsletter that farmers were dying of starvation in villages near Sariwon in North Hwanghae province.

"One to two North Koreans die every day," said the Buddhist group, which operates in the North but did not give the source of its information.

Good Friends cited an unnamed senior official of the ruling Workers' Party as saying the food situation was as bad as the famine years of the 1990s.

North Korea has since depended on foreign aid to help feed its 23 million people.

South Korea in recent years had provided its neighbour with about 400,000 tonnes of rice and 300,000 tonnes of fertiliser annually in bilateral aid.

But Pyongyang has so far not asked Seoul for the aid amid rising cross-border tensions. It is angry at the new South Korean government's policy of linking economic assistance -- but not humanitarian aid -- to denuclearisation.

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