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.
PHISHING: The con might appear convincing, as the scam e-mails can coincide with genuine messages from Apple saying you have run out of storage For a while you have been getting messages from Apple saying “your iCloud storage is full.” They say you have exceeded your storage plan, so documents are no longer being backed up, and photos you take are not being uploaded. You have been resisting Apple’s efforts to get you to pay a minimum of ￡0.99 (US$1.33) a month for more storage, but it seems that you cannot keep putting off the inevitable: You have received an e-mail which says your iCloud account has been blocked, and your photos and videos would be deleted very soon. To keep them you need
For two decades, researchers observed members of the Ngogo chimpanzee group of Kibale National Park in Uganda spend their days eating fruits and leaves, resting, traveling and grooming in their tropical rainforest abode, but this stable community then fractured and descended into years of deadly violence. The researchers are now describing the first clearly documented example of a group of wild chimpanzees splitting into two separate factions, with one launching a series of coordinated attacks against the other. Adult males and infants were targeted, with 28 deaths. “Biting, pounding the victim with their hands, dragging them, kicking them — mostly adult males,
The Israeli military has demolished entire villages as part of its invasion of south Lebanon, rigging homes with explosives and razing them to the ground in massive remote detonations. The Guardian reviewed three videos posted by the Israeli military and on social media, which showed Israel carrying out mass detonations in the villages of Taybeh, Naqoura and Deir Seryan along the Israel-Lebanon border. Lebanese media has reported more mass detonations in other border villages, but satellite imagery was not readily available to verify these claims. The demolitions came after Israeli Minister of Defense Israel Katz called for the destruction of
SUPERFAN: The Japanese PM played keyboard in a Deep Purple tribute band in middle school and then switched to drums at university, she told the British rock band Legendary British rock band Deep Purple yesterday made Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s day with a brief visit to their high-profile superfan as they returned to the nation they first toured more than half a century ago. Takaichi’s reputation as an amateur drummer, and a fan of hard rock and heavy metal has been well documented, and she has referred to Deep Purple as one of her favorite bands along with the likes of Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden. “You are my god,” a giddy Takaichi said in English to Deep Purple drummer Ian Paice, presenting him with a set of made-in-Japan
RSS