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_|North Korea to receive emergency food aid |_

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  • _|North Korea to receive emergency food aid |_

    [Some unclear referring to bird flu in this article - IOH]

    N Korea to receive emergency food aid

    Financial Times
    By Anna Fifield in Seoul , Financial Times, 30 Jun 2008

    Hungry North Koreans are expected to receive emergency food aid from the US this week amid increasing concern that the impoverished state is teetering on the brink of another famine.

    Amid signs of progress in nuclear disarmament talks, the United Nations World Food Programme has started unloading 37,000 tonnes of American wheat that arrived in the North Korean port of Nampo at the weekend, the first instalment of 400,000 tonnes in US aid.

    "The WFP will now be able to dramatically expand our food assistance operation and provide aid to millions of people who would otherwise be at risk of increased hunger and malnutrition," said Tony Banbury, the WFP's Asia director.

    With the new donations, the WFP plans to provide food to 5m North Koreans, up from the 1.2m people it was feeding before the new donations. However, this is still well below the 6.5m people it was feeding before 2006, when Kim Jong-il's regime clamped down on aid agencies.

    Donations to the WFP, the largest aid organisation operating in North Korea, have waxed and waned with developments in the nuclear talks in spite of humanitarian agencies urging governments not to use food as a political tool.

    The US said in May that it would provide 400,000 tonnes of food to North Korea through the WFP while American non-governmental organisations would distribute another 100,000 tonnes.

    Pressure is building on the South Korean government to resume food aid.

    It had been sending 400,000 to 500,000 tonnes of rice annually but it has not sent any food aid this year following the pledge by Lee Myung-bak, the new president, to get tough on Pyongyang.

    Malnutrition remains a chronic problem in North Korea, where as many as 2m people ? or 10 per cent of the population ? are thought to have died during a famine in the mid-1990s.

    Up to a third of North Koreans were already struggling to get enough food to eat, but the situation deteriorated markedly last summer, when the heaviest rain in four decades killed thousands of people and wiped out more than 10 per cent of crops.

    Combined with a severe lack of fertiliser, a bird flu outbreak that led to widespread poultry culls and spiralling global foods prices, North Korea is at risk of suffering another devastating famine, analysts have warned.

    The UN Food and Agricultural Organisation estimated in April that North Korea faced a cereal shortfall of more than 1.5m tonnes, the largest food gap since 2001.

    "Farmers are the worst affected because they have not been able to rebuild their crops after the 2006 and 2007 floods, so they don't have much to consume," said Erica Kang of Good Friends, a South Korean human rights group with contacts in the North.

    "But even the military is suffering ? infantry officers are boiling their leather belts and drinking the soup," she says, citing anecdotal reports from North Koreans.

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