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North Korea, WFP agree to scaled back aid plan http://today.reuters.com/News/CrisesArticle.aspx?storyId=PEK132512
Thu 11 May 2006
(Recasts with quotes, details)
By Lindsay Beck
BEIJING, May 11 (Reuters) - North Korea has agreed to accept aid from the World Food Programme months after it said it no longer wanted handouts, but the agency said on Thursday the scaled back programme will leave millions vulnerable to hunger.
Under the $102 million plan, agreed on Wednesday after months of negotiations, the WFP will provide food to 1.9 million people from some 6 million it was helping previously, with 75,000 tonnes of grain annually compared to more than 500,000 tonnes before.
"In the end, we've had to make some compromises, but we are very satisfied with the final result," Anthony Banbury, the WFP's regional director for Asia, told a news conference in Beijing.
"We would have liked to have seen a bigger operation but that was not possible at this time," he said.
The U.N. agency began working in North Korea in the mid-1990s after a famine that killed as many as 2.5 million people, but ended emergency food deliveries last year over disagreements on conditions for supplying the aid.
During its 10 years there, the WFP grew into North Korea's biggest humanitarian agency and one of its few windows to the outside world, but analysts said Pyongyang's dispute with the agency was aimed at curbing what it saw as an intrusive foreign presence.
Its new programme will have 10 foreign staff, compared with 48 previously, and where before the WFP had five field offices, now it will be based only in Pyongyang. Operations will resume immediately.
Priority will be on maternal and child health, but Banbury said the elderly, many of whom subsist on monthly pensions that buy little more than a kilo of rice, could no longer be provided for under the curtailed aid plan.
"The losers are the 4.2 million people that we're not going to assist," he said.
North Korea receives massive food aid from the South and support from China, but in the past year it has also banned the private sale of grain and reinstated a food rationing system, moves Human Rights Watch has warned could lead to renewed famine.
With the sowing season just underway, Banbury said it was too early to say how strong this year's harvest would be, but he added that the country was typically short about 1 million tonnes of grain.
"They recently did ask the Republic of Korea for 500,000 tonnes of food, which suggests to me that they are still facing a gap they cannot fill," he said.
"It's probably premature to say that the country is returning to famine, Banbury said.
But he added there were signs that "the food security situation is perhaps not improving the way it was in the past and there may be a deterioration."
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