UN seeks $60 million for North Korean food aid
Sep 2, 4:20 AM (ET)
By GILLIAN WONG
BEIJING (AP) - The U.N. food agency urged donors Tuesday to separate politics from humanitarian aid as it appealed for $60 million to help impoverished North Korea avert its worst food crisis since the 1990s.
The World Food Program said it needed the funds urgently for an emergency program to feed 6.3 million North Koreans.
The WFP needs a total of $503 million to fund the 15-month operation - but requires $60 million immediately to run the program until the end of the year, the agency's Asia director, Tony Banbury, told reporters in Beijing.
"We need the checks flowing to the banks today," Banbury said. "We sure hope that donors, as many have in the past, will look at this operation from a purely humanitarian point of view."
Political issues surfaced again last week when North Korea said it had stopped disabling its nuclear reactor and threatened to restore its plutonium-producing facility. The move jeopardizes a six-nation agreement requiring Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear weapons programs in return for energy aid and political concessions.
South Korea has said it will not tie the food issue to the North's nuclear disarmament, but a Seoul official said last week that South Korean public opinion is a consideration in deciding whether to accept the WFP's request for contributions.
On Tuesday, Unification Ministry spokesman Kim Ho-nyeon said Seoul is still considering the appeal.
Banbury said the WFP's latest assessment, conducted over three weeks, showed that more than half of the households in the country were surviving on two meals a day, with very limited consumption of meat. Many people were relying on relatives to supply food or scavenging for wild foods.
Flooding, poor harvests, and a drop in imports and food aid have caused North Korea's worst food crisis since the late 1990s and have put millions at risk, the agency says.
Communist North Korea has relied on foreign assistance to feed its 23 million people since the mid-1990s, when its economy was hit by natural disasters coupled with the loss of the regime's Soviet benefactor. As many as 2 million people are believed to have died of famine, exacerbated by a centrally controlled agriculture sector saddled with outdated farming methods.
The U.S. has pledged 400,000 tons of food to this operation together with 100,000 tons for a separate operation implemented by U.S. non-governmental organizations, Banbury said.
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