N.Korea food shortage crisis growing worse - WFP
Fri 27 May 2005
By Jon Herskovitz
SEOUL, May 27 (Reuters) - A food shortage crisis in North Korea is growing more severe by the day and the communist state is dispensing "starvation rations" to its population, a top U.N. agency official said on Friday.
The crisis has grown dire as international aid is drying up and food stocks from last year's harvest in North Korea grow short, Anthony Banbury, the regional director for Asia of the U.N.'s World Food Programme told a news conference in Seoul.
"There is now a food crisis in North Korea and that crisis is getting worse by the week, and by the day," Banbury said.
The situation is not as dire as the mid 1990s when over an estimated one million North Koreans died of starvation, but the current situation could deteriorate and bring about widespread famine, he said.
Banbury said North Korea bears a large measure of responsibility for the current food-shortage crisis.
North Korea has spent heavily to develop an atomic arsenal. It recently declared it has nuclear weapons, pulled out of talks on ending its nuclear ambitions and shut a nuclear reactor so that it could extract fissile material, which could be used to build plutonium bombs.
"This has not been conducive for helping the atmosphere for donations," Banbury said.
"In my conversation with all our major donors, one consistent theme emerges, and that is great frustration with the policies of the North government."
The WFP has stepped up monitoring of who receives the food aid it dispenses in North Korea and believes its food aid does not go to feed the North's million-man army, Banbury said.
The WFP aims to provide food assistance to about 6.5 million North Koreans in a population of about 22.5 million.
Those who are suffering the most these days are the urban poor, who have become more impoverished due to nascent economic reforms started in 2002 that have eaten away at the their incomes, aid agencies have said.
The North Korean government provides about 250 grams, or about two bowls of rice, in food rations a day. Banbury said the ration was currently about half of what the World Health Organisation recommends as the minimum daily health requirement.
Pyongyang may cut the ration to 200 grams a day as food supplies run short, he said.
"What the government is able to provide the people now, these 250 grams a day, is a starvation ration," Banbury said.
WFP assessments show urban residents are at a disadvantage compared with those in agricultural regions, particularly cooperative farm families who get more than twice as much food because they are allowed to keep some of their crops.
"The situation there (in North Korea) now is not as bad as in the mid-90s, but we may possibly be heading there," Banbury said.
He said the WFP had received 15,000 tonnes of food aid this year and it needed another 215,000 tonnes.
"Our stocks of all commodities are virtually depleted," he said.
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