The World Food Programme appealed to donors on Wednesday to separate nuclear diplomacy from humanitarian needs and step up assistance to North Korea to stop millions of people from going hungry.
North Korea is facing a food gap of 1 million tonnes, or about 20 percent of its needs, of which the UN agency can only fill a fraction because of a huge drop in donations over the past two years.
"If the donors do not respond to the request, millions of people are going to go hungry," Tony Banbury, the WFP's Asia director, told reporters following a trip to North Korea. "The nutritional status of millions of people is going to worsen. Pregnant women are going to have bad birth outcomes. Infant mortality may indeed increase."
Food donations to North Korea - both through its main benefactors China and South Korea and through the WFP - fell dramatically in 2006, a year in which the reclusive country stayed away from six-party talks aimed at dismantling its atomic programme and conducted its first nuclear test. But Banbury said progress in the talks among the two Koreas, the United States, host China, Japan and Russia should not influence humanitarian assistance.
"While political discussions continue in other channels, those political discussions ought not to prevent simple citizens, civilians, normal people, from having the food they require to provide a healthy life for their children," he said.
North Korea suffered a famine in the 1990s that killed as many as 2.5 million people, and since has faced food shortages, which were compounded last year by severe summer floods. Despite its chronic needs, the country forced the WFP to radically scale back its programmes last year, saying it no longer wanted handouts.
Less aid also reduces WFP access in North Korea, where it is one of the country's few windows on the outside world. Banbury said North Korea had "expressed a new openness to receiving increased food assistance" and openly acknowledged its food gap.
But with the WFP's current, smaller programme only partially funded, any expansion would hinge on donor countries' willingness to significantly boost aid. North Korea receives some bilateral donations, especially from the South, which will this week resume aid suspended last year following its missile and nuclear tests.
But Banbury said there was less guarantee that bilateral aid reached the most vulnerable, adding it also reduced the WFP's ability to negotiate with the North Korean government to ensure access and monitoring for its assistance. "If food is channelled through the WFP, I think our leverage to insist on good monitoring is greatly increased," he said.
"But right now, when we're only reaching 3 percent of the population, our ability to have those types of negotiations with the government is certainly reduced." North Korea agreed at six-party talks in February to shut down its main nuclear reactor in exchange for aid and security assurances, but Banbury said countries should not wait for that deal to be implemented before offering assistance. "The problem is, we can't wait. The people of North Korea can't wait. The lean season is upon us."
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