North and South Korea yesterday began landmark talks on agriculture aimed at helping the cash-strapped North wean itself off international food aid.
Agriculture experts from both countries met at Kaesong City, just north of the inter-Korean border, for a two-day session, said an official from South Korea's Unification Ministry.
South Korean officials said Seoul would present a few pilot projects including joint farming, the supply of saplings from the South for the denuded mountains in the North as well as the provision of technological aid.
"In the long term, it will be more significant than providing emergency food aid to help North Koreans to find means to feed themselves," an official of the Unification Ministry said.
South Korea's chief delegate, vice agricultural minister Lee Myung-soo, said the talks were historic.
"This marks the first time that agricultural authorities from the North and South have met since the division of Korea," he said.
Lee's North Korean counterpart Mun Ung-jo said the meetings would "help lay the ground for reunification of the fatherland."
North and South Korea have been expanding economic exchanges since a historic inter-Korean summit in 2000, even though the two sides are still technically at war .
South Korea remains the main provider of humanitarian aid to Pyongyang. For this year alone, it supplied 500,000 tonnes of food and 350,000 tonnes of fertilizer.
The UN World Food Program (WFP) warned last week that more than 3 million North Koreans face a hungry winter unless more food donations are received.
The WFP, which has been supplying food to 6.5 million vulnerable people in the impoverished North, said it was unable to provide rations of cereals, its staple commodity, to nearly one million North Koreans at present.
North Korea has relied since 1995 on foreign aid to feed its 23 million people.
"This year's food crisis in the North has been exceptionally severe, owing to an acute lack of affordable local staples, not least because of record-high cereal prices in private markets," said WFP director James Morris.
A famine may have left up to 2 million dead in the mid-to-late 1990s, according to humanitarian aid workers in the reclusive state.
The UN agency has repeatedly warned that the 1990s famine could recur unless urgent action is taken.
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