SOUTH KOREA TO BACK NORTH KOREA JOINING IMF, WORLD BANK.
South Korea will help North Korea join international financial organizations which could provide access to financial aid, Reuters reports South Korean Trade Minister Han Duck-soo said yesterday. Han said joining institutions like the IMF or the World Bank could help North Korea to develop its social infrastructure.
"If the conditions are met for entering those organizations, it will certainly be of great help to North Korea as well as to the outside world, not to mention South Korea. So we strongly support that," Han is quoted as saying. "It depends on the members to assess whether preconditions are being met."
Han said it was not yet clear when North Korea could join the organizations. "If South Korea can be of any help we would like to cooperate with them in completing the conditions," he said. "We hope that North Korea will be eligible for entry."
The IMF said earlier this year it could offer North Korea non-financial aid like training programs for Pyongyang economic planners. This kind of aid would not require North Korea to join the Fund.
The news comes as AFP reports that the North Korean government yesterday asked the international community for $250 million in aid to revitalize the country's devastated agricultural sector and ensure adequate food supplies. The North Korean delegation, led by Deputy Foreign Minister Choi Su Hon, was to discuss the conditions of the aid package with 22 donor countries during the two-day meeting of the UNDP in Geneva, begun Tuesday.
Two million people are estimated to have died of famine in North Korea, notes the story, and the country has been hit by a series of catastrophic floods, cyclones and droughts in a three-year period between 1996 and 1999. UNDP figures show that North Korea's agricultural production plunged 70 percent in the last four years, while the country's GDP fell by 50 percent in the same period. North Korea also suffered serious energy shortages which have led to deforestation, a problem the aid is destined to help address.
But the North Korean economy expanded an estimated 6.2 percent last year, its first growth spurt in a decade, and warming relations with South Korea and the US may help sustain the recovery, the Wall Street Journal (p. A22) notes.