North Korea's food crisis has eased -- but not enough for the UN and other aid groups to end their humanitarian work in the country as Pyongyang has requested, the UN humanitarian chief warned.
North Korea announced on Thursday that it wanted all emergency humanitarian assistance from international organizations to stop by the end of the year, partly because of what it called political interference from the US.
Undersecretary-General Jan Egeland, the UN humanitarian affairs coordinator, told reporters on Friday that aid groups were trying to figure out if they could reclassify some of their work as development assistance, something North Korea will still allow.
"We want to end all humanitarian programs all over the world because we want, as humanitarians, to see development and ourselves out of work," Egeland said. "But that time has not come yet in our view in North Korea."
Other UN agencies are also in talks with North Korea on how to overcome their differences over emergency food, UN officials said on Friday.
"This is a very sensitive issue," said Elisabeth Byrs, spokeswoman for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. "There are discussions with the North Korean government at the moment ... in order to continue the humanitarian programs. The improvement in malnutrition and elsewhere are primarily due to effective humanitarian assistance," she said.
The UN World Food Program said it is negotiating with the North Korean government to find ways to change its food aid into development programs. But the Rome-based organization stressed that the North Korean government had not asked it to leave the country.
"We have not been asked to terminate our assistance ... the government wants us to stay in place and the WFP wants to stay," spokeswoman Christiane Berthiaume said.
The nation of 22 million has received emergency food from the UN and other international groups since natural disasters and mismanagement caused its economy to collapse in the mid-1990s. Famine has killed an estimated 2 million people. This year, the WFP is providing food assistance to about 6.5 million North Koreans -- mainly children, pregnant and nursing women, elderly or otherwise vulnerable people.
Egeland said that North Korea had seen improvement since the late 1990s, when many humanitarian groups started working there. Acute malnutrition dropped from 16 percent to seven percent, while chronic malnutrition fell to 37 percent from 62 percent, he said. He said North Korea had approached the UN at the start of September about cutting back its programs and officials had been in "intensive dialogue" about how to proceed.
Berthiaume said 70 percent of WFP's aid already goes to development projects such as food-for-work programs or making enriched food.
‘CROSSING THE LINE’: China’s embassy in Seoul criticized US Forces Korea Commander General Xavier Brunson, asking if his ‘hostile’ remarks were authorized by Washington South Korea and the US are in talks over recent public remarks by the commander of US Forces Korea, Seoul’s presidential office said yesterday, after the comments drew sharp criticism from China. In a recent podcast interview, US Forces Korea Commander General Xavier Brunson described South Korea as “the dagger in the heart of Asia” from China’s east coast, prompting the Chinese embassy in Seoul to say that he had “truly crossed the line.” The interview came amid growing speculation that Washington might seek to expand the role of US Forces Korea in countering the growing regional influence of China, a key
Through the noise of rushing papers and whirring belts at a print factory in Kyoto, two creators watch their photo essay come to life in broadsheet form — part of an effort to win new audiences in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). Despite the decline of the publishing industry, self-publication and handmade “zine” magazines are growing in popularity in Japan, reflecting the nation’s enduring love of paper in the digital era. While speaking to Agence France-Presse at the plant, his hands black with ink, one of the creators, Kazuma Obara, said: “I think [paper] is a medium that engages all five
Australian researchers have trained lab-grown brain cells on a silicon computer chip to play the 1990s shooter game Doom and said they are just scratching the surface of what the neurons could be capable of doing. It is the science-fiction work of biotech boffins at Cortical Labs, who researched and developed the technology that harnesses the workings of the brain’s networking system. Each so-called “biological computer” contains about 200,000 living human brain cells, grown from stem cells that were harvested from blood donations. Having mastered the simple computer game Pong, where a paddle is moved up and down to send a ball
France experienced its hottest spring on record, the French weather service said on Tuesday, after an exceptional early heat wave that also broke highs for the season in England and Wales. Meteo-France said the average nationwide temperature over March to May was 13.8°C — about 1.7°C above the norm, and surpassing records set in 2011 and 2020. “The warmest spring since records began in 1900,” it said in a bulletin. All three months were warmer than average, but the onset of an “unprecedented heatwave” late last month pushed the mercury to highs typically seen at the height of the summer. “Our country had never
RSS