South Korea will consider resuming large-scale food aid to North Korea only if it clearly shows repentance for a deadly attack on a warship, a senior official said Monday.

Vice Unification Minister Um Jong-Sik urged Pyongyang to acknowledge its wrongdoing, apologise and punish those involved in the sinking of a South Korean warship in March.

"I believe inter-Korean relations can improve only when such things are done," he told a local radio programme.

"Then, things like large-scale government food assistance can be carried out," he said, adding Seoul would assess the North's food situation and the overall state of relations before shipping food aid.

South Korea in 2008 suspended an annual shipment of 400,000 tons of rice to its impoverished neighbour as ties worsened.

Relations soured dramatically this year after the South accused the North of torpedoing the corvette and killing 46 sailors in March.

The North denied involvement, and threatened retaliation for the South's military exercises staged as a show of strength. But it has been making a series of apparent peace overtures this month.

It returned the crew of a South Korean boat accused of poaching on its fishing grounds and proposed the resumption of a reunion programme for families separated since the 1950-1953 war.

The South's Red Cross said it would send aid, including 5,000 tons of rice, to help flood victims in the North's northwest.

The North, however, criticised South Korea for being tight-fisted with flood aid, saying the 5,000 tons of rice was not enough to feed North Koreans "even for a day".

"I wonder if that will ever fill our stomach... it makes us think again about the scale of their generosity," Tongil Sinbo, the North's state weekly, said in an editorial published Sunday.

Aid groups warned that this year's flooding would aggravate the North's chronic food shortages.

earlier related report
US official says China onboard on N.Korea
Washington (AFP) Sept 20, 2010 - China, North Korea's main ally, agrees with the United States that denuclearization talks can only resume if Pyongyang shows its seriousness about past agreements, a senior US official said Monday.

China has called for the resumption of talks on ending North Korea's nuclear program and faced strong criticism from some US lawmakers, who believe Beijing has not done enough to prod its neighbor.

But Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg, who recently met with China's chief nuclear negotiator, said Washington and Beijing agreed that North Korea needed to adhere to a 2005 denuclearization agreement before new talks.

"I think that there is a recognition that there is simply little value in moving forward without some very concrete indication that the North Koreans are interested in implementing the 2005 statement," Steinberg said.

"And the Chinese were very clear on that. There was no disagreement at all," Steinberg told a forum at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

"They realize that given what's happened on a number of fronts -- both with the actions of the North Koreans last year and then following the Cheonan -- that we are not simply going to go back to talking," he said.

North Korea last year tested a long-range missile and a nuclear bomb and stormed out of six-nation denuclearization talks, which involve China, Japan, the two Koreas, Russia and the United States.

In March, South Korea's Cheonan ship sank, killing 46 sailors. The United States and South Korea say that North Korea torpedoed the vessel, making it the deadliest incident on the peninsula in decades.

China has not endorsed the findings of the Cheonan probe and its state media has urged the United States, South Korea and Japan not to "bully" North Korea.

On Thursday, Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said Beijing and Washington both wanted dialogue to "create conditions for the early resumption of the six-party talks."

In the 2005 agreement and a related statement in 2007, North Korea agreed to give up its nuclear weapons in return for security guarantees and badly needed aid.