Country ends food aid program

An agency has delivered $1.7 billion in assistance during a 10-year period.
Knight Ridder Newspapers
BEIJING -- The World Food Program will halt humanitarian food aid to 6 million North Koreans at the end of this month because the North Korean government says it has enough food to feed its hungry people, the WFP director said Thursday.
The closure of the World Food Program's humanitarian assistance comes as North Korea expels about a dozen nongovernmental aid groups after European condemnation of its human rights record. The North Korea dictatorship holds political prisoners and denies its citizens basic rights. The United States and regional partners want the isolated and secretive nation to give up its nuclear weapons programs.
The halting of the food aid appears to be the result of North Korean paranoia about foreigners' wandering about in the country, increased economic aid from South Korea and China, and an uptick in agricultural output.
Recent harvests have improved North Korea's food situation, prompting its government to demand that the Rome-based World Food Program switch its focus in the country from feeding people to development assistance, such as construction and jobs programs.
"The government there has concluded that it no longer needs emergency humanitarian assistance," James Morris, the World Food Program director, said at a news conference, adding that government officials think they have sufficient food.
Troubling findings
Morris said, however, his agency thinks there still is a shortage, and that as many as one-third of North Korean women remain anemic and in need of nutritional help.
A survey last year found that 37 percent of the children were chronically malnourished, or "stunted," and 7 percent were acutely malnourished, or "wasted," Morris said.
The WFP, which has delivered $1.7 billion in food aid to alleviate famine and malnutrition in North Korea in the past decade, has made huge inroads in bolstering the health of the country's pregnant women and malnourished children, Morris said.
During a two-day visit to Pyongyang, North Korea's capital, Morris said he'd had "good conversations" with Cabinet ministers, but that they'd made it clear that North Korea, which also is known as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, wanted to slash the WFP's international staff in the country. Once numbering 47 foreigners, the staff now numbers 32, he said.
"I suspect that they are uncomfortable with what they would consider to be a large number of non-DPRK citizens wandering about in the country," Morris said.
North Korea also chafed at WFP efforts to monitor food distribution to ensure that the aid arrived in the hands of those most in need.