The World Food Program (WFP) issued an emergency appeal yesterday for aid for North Korea, saying the agency's supplies have nearly run out and it is cutting off food to almost all the 6.5 million people that it feeds there.
The WFP will be able to feed only about 100,000 North Koreans -- mostly women and children -- over the next two months, said Masood Hyder, the UN agency's representative in the North.
"A food crisis is on us at the wrong time," Hyder said at a news conference in Beijing. The agency is trying to feed more than one-third of the North's 23 million people.
The US, Russia and others have pledged thousands of tonnes of grain and other food since the WFP warned late last year that its supplies were running low, Hyder said. But he said those shipments won't start arriving until late next month due to the difficulty of moving such vast amounts of commodities.
"We are trying all emergency measures ... including asking whether the [North Korean] government itself can give us a short-term loan," he said. It isn't clear how much food the secretive Stalinist dictatorship might have in its own stockpiles.
The North has relied on foreign aid to feed its isolated populace since revealing in the mid-1990s that its agriculture had collapsed after decades of mismanagement and the loss of Soviet subsidies.
The WFP appeal comes against a backdrop of mounting tension over the North's nuclear program. Diplomats from the US, the two Koreas, China, Japan and Russia are to meet in two weeks in Bei-jing for their second round of talks on the standoff.
Despite the diplomatic tensions, leading critics of the North's nuclear program -- Washington, Tokyo and Seoul -- are among its biggest aid donors. The US is sending 38,000 tonnes of grain, due to arrive in late next month.
Though foreign donors are making a "valiant effort" to separate politics from aid decisions, international tension "certainly affects humanitarian assistance," Hyder said.
Referring to the nuclear talks, he said, "as the political context improves, certainly the possibility of a more generous response might be affected."
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