SEOUL (AFP) - South Korea said Thursday it wants direct talks with North Korea to discuss providing badly needed food aid, apparently softening its position that the communist state must first ask for help.

"If we have a chance, we will talk directly to Pyongyang" on food aid, Foreign Minister Yu Myung-Hwan told reporters.

The North has cut ties with President Lee Myung-Bak's conservative government in protest at its firmer overall line on cross-border relations.

The prospect of a request to Seoul for food aid is remote considering Pyongyang has branded Lee a "traitor," among other insults.

But South Korea is coming under domestic pressure to ease its position, with some analysts saying the North is on the verge of another famine.

"Many of our brothers are starving to death in North Korea," said Ahn Sang-Soo, parliamentary leader of Lee's Grand National Party.

"The government should help those people by providing unconditional humanitarian aid to the North," Yonhap news agency quoted him as saying.

South Korea in recent years has given the North some 400,000 tons of rice and 300,000 tons of fertiliser annually. The North made no request this year.

Yu said Seoul prefers direct aid shipments to the North, rather than going through international agencies. It is the leading donor to the current World Food Programme (WFP) programme in North Korea that ends this year.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il appears to have admitted a food crisis.

"At this time, there is no more urgent and important task than resolving the issue of feeding the people," Pyongyang's state-controlled Chung-Ang TV on Wednesday quoted him as saying during a farm tour.

Kim blamed his nation's limited arable land and called for crop yields to be "decisively raised to settle the food problem," the official Korean Central News Agency reported.

The US State Department has said it is working on a new food aid proposal that includes better monitoring of distribution, but no agreement has yet been reached.

A South Korean foreign ministry official, who returned home from talks in Washington on food aid to the North, told Yonhap the United States has decided in principle to provide 500,000 tonnes through the WFP.

Details will be decided after a second team of US experts visits the North, he said on condition of anonymity.

A US think tank, the Peterson Institute for International Economics, warned this month that the North is at risk of outright famine -- 10 years after up to one million of its people died of starvation.

Chronic food shortages worsened this year due to soaring grain prices, crop damage following floods last summer and dwindling foreign donations.

Despite the recent chill in relations, Seoul's unification ministry said Thursday it has earmarked 10.2 billion won (9.5 million dollars) this year to support non-governmental organisations that help North Korea.

It also allocated 4.07 million dollars to support a UNICEF programme for North Korean infants, and 10.27 million dollars for a similar programme run by the World Health Organisation.

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