BEIJING, May 26 (AFP) - The vast majority of North Korea's starving and malnourished children would not be alive today were it not for intervention by the foreign community, an aid worker said Wednesday. "Of North Korea's two million children under the age of five, 70 percent are at very high risk. Without our timely support, maybe some would still be around, but it would have been a very sad story," said UNICEF representative to North Korea Dilawar Ali Khan. "Without the help of UNICEF and the World Food Program, I think that most of those children would not be here today," he told a press briefing in Beijing. When compared with the situation in famine-ravaged North Korea in 1995 -- the year UNICEF began crisis operations in the country -- the aid has "brought a big change, and stemmed the crisis," Khan said. Khan was in the Chinese capital to debrief UNICEF donors and launch a renewed funding drive which will seek more than 20 million dollars to continue operations focusing on nutrition rehabilitation and improvements in health care and sanitation. Responding to a question about the tide of would-be refugees that have strained the North Korean-Chinese border, Khan admitted that pressure to flee the Stalinist state remained strong. "The compulsion to leave and search for food and income earning capacity are there, but how many people manage to do it (escape) and do it without being gone from this planet, I don't know," he said. Khan characterized the rumours of cannibalism that have hung over the country "unkind" and stressed that the North Koreans were a "very civilized" people. He added that while he was unable to comment on what had happened in the early stages of the famine, which began in 1995, he felt it was "impossible" that cannibalism was occurring in 1999. North Korea was hit hard by a series of natural disasters beginning in 1995, which came on top of the collapse of the Soviet bloc which had thrown the nation into deeper isolation. Millions are said to have starved to death in the past three years and the agriculture sector remains badly damaged. North Korean officials recently said the nation had also suffered crop damage this year due to five months of drought. Pyongyang has been relying on foreign aid since its stocks ran out last year.  