Emergency appeal urged to feed N Koreans

The World Food Programme issued an emergency appeal today for aid for North Korea, saying the agency’s supplies have nearly run out and it is cutting off food to almost all the 6.5 million people that it feeds there.

WFP will be able to feed only about 100,000 North Koreans – mostly women and children – over the next two months, said Masood Hyder, the UN agency’s representative in the North.

“A food crisis is on us at the wrong time,” Hyder said at a news conference in Beijing. The agency is trying to feed more than one-third of the North’s 23 million people.

The United States, Russia and others have pledged thousands of tons of grain and other food since WFP warned late last year that its supplies were running low, Hyder said.

But he said those shipments will not start arriving until late March due to the difficulty of moving such vast amounts of commodities.

“We are trying all emergency measures … including asking whether the (North Korean) government itself can give us a short-term loan,” he said. It is not clear how much food the secretive Stalinist dictatorship might have in its own stockpiles.

The North has relied on foreign aid to feed its isolated populace since revealing in the mid-1990s that its agriculture had collapsed after decades of mismanagement and the loss of Soviet subsidies.

The WFP appeal comes against a backdrop of mounting tension over the North’s nuclear programmes.

Diplomats from the US, the Koreas, China, Japan and Russia are to meet in two weeks in Beijing for their second round of talks on the standoff.

Figures given by Hyder indicated that the WFP has as little as 3,000 tons of food left in the North.

The agency’s plans call for distributing about 40,000 tons of food a month – mostly rice, wheat, corn, sugar and high-protein wheat biscuits.

The agency does not expect mass fatalities from starvation, Hyder said. But he said malnutrition and other health problems would surge among North Koreans whose daily aid rations of about 7.5 ounces of food already were considered the bare minimum needed.

Foreign donors have given more than eight million tons of food to North Korea since the mid-1990s.

But the WFP has struggled in recent years to meet aid targets for the North, getting as little as 60% of the food it needs each year.