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Millions Hungry, But North Korea Tells U.S. to Stop Sending Food

In this April 2000 World Food Program file photo, North Korean children at a Pyongyang nursery eat a lunch consisting of locally produced seaweed soup, Canadian herrings and bread made from U.S. wheat supplied through the WFP. (AP Photo/World Food Program)
(CNSNews.com)-North Korea has told the U.S. to stop providing food aid, the State Department confirmed Tuesday, one day after a bleak new United Nations report described conditions in the country as “dire and desperate.” The U.S. last May pledged 500,000 tons of food over a 12-month period and has delivered 169,000 tons of it to date, in seven shipments up until the end of January. But Washington has now been told North Korea does not want any more, State Department spokesman Robert Wood said. Pyongyang’s decision comes at a time of fresh tensions in the region. The six-party talks on North Korea’s nuclear weapons programs are stalled, and its plans to place a satellite in orbit early next month have prompted international concerns that it really intends to test an intercontinental ballistic missile. North Korea also has charged that joint U.S.-South Korean military exercises currently underway are preparations for an invasion, and has responded by shutting off inter-Korean communications channels.South Korea’s unification minister, Hyun In-taek, told reporters in Seoul that the North’s rejection of food aid could be its response to international criticism about the planned rocket launch. Wood said the North Koreans had not given a reason for a decision, but pointed out that the food aid was unrelated to efforts to resolve the nuclear standoff.“This humanitarian assistance that we provide to the North has nothing to do with the six-party talks,” he said. “This is about our true humanitarian concern for these people.” Wood said the most recent U.S. food shipment had arrived in late January and was being distributed by U.S. non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Those NGOs have now been ordered to leave North Korea by the end of March, according to one of the agencies, Mercy Corps. The U.N. World Food Program (WFP), also involved in distributing U.S. aid, reported last week that North Korea will soon enter its “lean season,” a critical period when food stocks from last year’s harvest run low.In Geneva on Monday, a U.N. “special rapporteur” for North Korea, Vitit Muntarbhorn, presented a report saying that around 8.7 million North Koreans-more than one-third of the population-were affected by food insecurity and needed help.Of those, however, only 1.8 million people were getting it.Muntarbhorn said the communist regime had long used food rations as a means to impose control over citizens.He urged it to cooperate constructively with U.N. and other humanitarian agencies to ensure the effective provision of food and other basic necessities. And he said the international community should “take more proactive measures...to impel more protection for the inhabitants.” The report was presented at a session of the U.N. Human Rights Council, where democracies’ representatives voiced concern about the situation while others, including delegates for Syria, China, Russia and Laos, suggested the investigation into North Korea was “selective” and based on political considerations.Responding to the report, North Korean representative Sang Il Hun called it a product of U.S. hostility towards Pyongyang and European politicization of human rights. The North Korean government, he said, had its own “true” and “superior” human rights system in place and would continue to develop it further. A WFP-UNICEF survey in 2005 found that at least 37 percent of North Korean children were chronically malnourished and one-third of mothers were malnourished and suffered from anemia – key factors contributing to child malnutrition.
By Patrick Goodenough, International Editor
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