SEOUL (Reuters) - U.N. food agencies have wrapped up a month-long visit to North Korea to assess the food situation in the isolated state after Pyongyang appealed for aid from the international community.
Officials from the World Food Programme (WFP) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) are expected to issue their report at the end of the month.
The world became acutely aware of the North’s inability to feed itself in the 1990s when a famine killed an estimated 1 million of its then population of 22 million people. It continues to suffer from chronic food shortages and malnutrition.
According to the WFP’s hunger index, the North’s situation is still classified as serious. Some 5 million of the country’s 24 million people face food shortages, according to a U.N. report issued last November. While malnutrition rates among children have decreased in the last decade, one in every three children remains chronically malnourished.
Aid groups and experts say the North is facing looming food shortages due to bad weather which has hurt harvests and an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease. Rising food prices have also pushed up the cost of imports. And international handouts have shrunk as the North has stepped up its nuclear and missile programmes.
Five U.S.-based NGOs said this month food assistance should be shipped to North Korea before the start of the ‘lean season,’ which runs May to July, prior to the fall harvest.
Experts and officials disagree over whether the impoverished North is actually experiencing worsening shortages. In November, the U.N said the North faced an overall grain deficit of 542,000 tonnes, but added the staple food output had actually increased by 3 percent in 2010/11 from a year earlier.
More than 15 years after the North first asked the international community for food aid during the deadly famine, Pyongyang is again asking for food donations. Dozens of countries have been approached in recent weeks. Essentially, the North wants more rice.
Notably, Pyongyang has asked the United States to resume food aid, which was suspended in 2008 over a monitoring row. Washington says it will consider the request after reviewing the assessment of the food situation in the North. A resumption of U.S. aid to the North might act as a catalyst for renewed diplomacy amid a standoff over Pyongyang’s nuclear programmes and attacks on the peninsula last year. The U.S. has given about $800 million in food aid to the North since 1996.
Critics of food aid say the North has in the past siphoned off the food to feed its million-strong army, missing its intended recipients: children, the elderly and women.
One defector, a port official, said that within two hours of being taken from a ship in 2007, the rice was being sold in the market by high-ranking military types to generate hard currency.
Washington does not want to be seen to be rewarding North Korea for its bad behaviour. At a hearing on the North last week, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the chairwoman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, said food shipments can only be resumed when full and transparent monitoring is in place.
Seoul has cut all aid to the North since two attacks last year killed 50 South Koreans. Although, just a month before the North’s deadly bombardment of the South’s Yeonpyeong island, Seoul did send its first rice aid shipment in two years.
Government officials say the North’s pleas for food are suspicious. They say it is trying to stock up on food ahead of massive celebrations next year, the centenary of state founder Kim Il-sung’s birth. The year also marks leader Kim Jong-il’s long-pledged plan to create a “strong and prosperous nation” by 2012. Some experts expect Kim to further cement the succession of youngest son, Jong-un, next year.
Government officials have also said the North wants to hoard food ahead a third nuclear test, which is bound to provoke a further tightening of international sanctions.
Reporting by Jeremy Laurence; Editing by Sanjeev Miglani
