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WFP warns of food crisis in North Korea

2004-02-11

About 6.5 million North Koreans will not receive food rations in February and March, the World Food Program warned on Monday (Feb. 9), calling for urgent international assistance to help feed the country's hungriest people.

The WFP has run out of food due to a funding crisis and is being forced to provide aid only to 75,000 pregnant women and 8,000 children in orphanages and hospitals, the U.N. agency said.

"We are scraping the bottom of the barrel," Masood Hyder, WFP representative for the communist country, said at a news conference in Beijing. "Over 4 million core beneficiaries - the most vulnerable children, women and elderly people - are now deprived of very vital rations."

The WFP is seeking 485,000 tons of food in 2004 for the communist state but has secured pledges for only 140,000 tons to date and only a fraction of that has arrived in the North. The United States, Canada, Australia and Norway have recently vowed support and South Korea is also preparing to make donations in time.

The Seoul government will soon make decisions on food provisions to North Korea through the WFP, a Foreign Ministry official told The Korea Herald. The official declined to give an exact figure but about 100,000 tons of food, the same amount as the past two years, is likely to be committed.

But little of this food will arrive before April and the current commitments are only sufficient to meet cereal needs for about three months, meaning there could be another inevitable shortage in July.

"Unless they get help very soon, the damage could be irreparable," said Hyder.

The WFP blamed the funding shortfall on the impoverished state's nuclear weapons development and donor fatigue caused by nine years of food aid to the North.

Hyder urged donor countries to separate politics from aid decisions but acknowledged that international tension "certainly affects humanitarian assistance."

Most donor nations say politics play no part in their allocation of donations but international humanitarian assistance fell 38 percent last year from a year earlier.

Japan, once a key donor, has cut off aid to the North in wake of Pyongyang's failure to resolve the issue of kidnapped Japanese nationals.

But the U.N. representative expressed hope that a second round of six-nation talks scheduled for later this month in Beijing could change the political atmosphere.

"As the political context improves, certainly the possibility of a more generous response might be affected," said Hyder.

South Korea's top intelligence agency predicted early this year that its neighbor to the North would see a food shortage of about 2 million tons in 2004, with food demand and supply estimated at 6.39 million tons and 4.25 million tons, respectively.

A large-scale survey conducted in October 2002 by UNICEF, WFP and the North Korean government found 42 percent of North Korean children to be suffering from chronic malnutrition or stunted growth. One-third of mothers surveyed were malnourished and anemic.

Source : www.korea.net