A German news report said Monday that North Korea has recently asked Germany, currently in the grip of a mad cow disease crisis, to provide it with a donation of 200,000 heads of cattle as food aid.

German public broadcast station ARD said that the North delivered its wishes to the German Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry through the "Cap Anamur," a German relief agency operating in North Korea.

Fears of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), commonly known as mad cow disease, has caused beef consumption in Germany to plummet, with slaughterhouses operating at only 30 percent capacity and consumption decreasing by 80 percent. A total of 400,000 cows are set to be slaughtered there in an attempt to weed out older cows that are more susceptible to the disease.

Mad cow disease is thought to be connected to the new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, fatal in humans.