North Korea, slowly recovering from a famine in the late 1990s, is still in the middle of a humanitarian emergency with no relief in sight, UN aid officials warned yesterday.
Representatives of five UN agencies said crop production in North Korea was growing, more people were being fed and far fewer children suffered malnutrition than five years ago.
But the impoverished and isolated North is in the midst of a "chronic emergency ... without a clear end in sight", said Rick Corsino, the World Food Programme's director in Pyongyang, as the UN appealed for US$221 million in aid for next year.
"By all measures, [North Korea] remains a country in need of massive humanitarian support. The consequences of doing nothing are very substantial. If there's no response, or too weak a response, parts of the country will very likely revert to a food crisis."
Aid donations to North Korea had not met demand this year or last, he said. The WFP was given about two-thirds of the aid it asked for and UNICEF's projects this year were 50 percent underfunded.
Corsino declined to link the crisis over North Korea's nuclear weapons program, which began in October last year, to the aid shortfall, but said donations from the US and Japan had fallen.
The bulk of what the UN seeks this year -- US$190 million -- is for food aid designed to help 6.5 million people.
Critics say food aid helps support North Korea's 1.14-million-strong military, even if the food is not diverted to army barracks, because the government has said it reserves the first cut of harvests for the armed forces.
Pierrette Vu Thi, UNICEF's representative in North Korea, said 40 percent of children were chronically malnourished last year compared with 60 percent in 1998.
But about 70,000 children in the country of 23 million were still malnourished and risked death without medical care, she said.
Another reason to continue aid to North Korea was to support tentative and gradual economic reforms introduced last year, Corsino said.
Signs of economic activity had risen markedly since last November, he said. There were more construction projects and more regular supply of water and electricity to cities.
By 2027, Denmark would relocate its foreign convicts to a prison in Kosovo under a 200-million-euro (US$228.6 million) agreement that has raised concerns among non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and residents, but which could serve as a model for the rest of the EU. The agreement, reached in 2022 and ratified by Kosovar lawmakers last year, provides for the reception of up to 300 foreign prisoners sentenced in Denmark. They must not have been convicted of terrorism or war crimes, or have a mental condition or terminal disease. Once their sentence is completed in Kosovan, they would be deported to their home country. In
Brazil, the world’s largest Roman Catholic country, saw its Catholic population decline further in 2022, while evangelical Christians and those with no religion continued to rise, census data released on Friday by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) showed. The census indicated that Brazil had 100.2 million Roman Catholics in 2022, accounting for 56.7 percent of the population, down from 65.1 percent or 105.4 million recorded in the 2010 census. Meanwhile, the share of evangelical Christians rose to 26.9 percent last year, up from 21.6 percent in 2010, adding 12 million followers to reach 47.4 million — the highest figure
A Chinese scientist was arrested while arriving in the US at Detroit airport, the second case in days involving the alleged smuggling of biological material, authorities said on Monday. The scientist is accused of shipping biological material months ago to staff at a laboratory at the University of Michigan. The FBI, in a court filing, described it as material related to certain worms and requires a government permit. “The guidelines for importing biological materials into the US for research purposes are stringent, but clear, and actions like this undermine the legitimate work of other visiting scholars,” said John Nowak, who leads field
LOST CONTACT: The mission carried payloads from Japan, the US and Taiwan’s National Central University, including a deep space radiation probe, ispace said Japanese company ispace said its uncrewed moon lander likely crashed onto the moon’s surface during its lunar touchdown attempt yesterday, marking another failure two years after its unsuccessful inaugural mission. Tokyo-based ispace had hoped to join US firms Intuitive Machines and Firefly Aerospace as companies that have accomplished commercial landings amid a global race for the moon, which includes state-run missions from China and India. A successful mission would have made ispace the first company outside the US to achieve a moon landing. Resilience, ispace’s second lunar lander, could not decelerate fast enough as it approached the moon, and the company has
RSS