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.
With much pomp and circumstance, Cairo is today to inaugurate the long-awaited Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM), widely presented as the crowning jewel on authorities’ efforts to overhaul the country’s vital tourism industry. With a panoramic view of the Giza pyramids plateau, the museum houses thousands of artifacts spanning more than 5,000 years of Egyptian antiquity at a whopping cost of more than US$1 billion. More than two decades in the making, the ultra-modern museum anticipates 5 million visitors annually, with never-before-seen relics on display. In the run-up to the grand opening, Egyptian media and official statements have hailed the “historic moment,” describing the
SECRETIVE SECT: Tetsuya Yamagami was said to have held a grudge against the Unification Church for bankrupting his family after his mother donated about ￥100m The gunman accused of killing former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe yesterday pleaded guilty, three years after the assassination in broad daylight shocked the world. The slaying forced a reckoning in a nation with little experience of gun violence, and ignited scrutiny of alleged ties between prominent conservative lawmakers and a secretive sect, the Unification Church. “Everything is true,” Tetsuya Yamagami said at a court in the western city of Nara, admitting to murdering the nation’s longest-serving leader in July 2022. The 45-year-old was led into the room by four security officials. When the judge asked him to state his name, Yamagami, who
DEADLY PREDATORS: In New South Wales, smart drumlines — anchored buoys with baited hooks — send an alert when a shark bites, allowing the sharks to be tagged High above Sydney’s beaches, drones seek one of the world’s deadliest predators, scanning for the flick of a tail, the swish of a fin or a shadow slipping through the swell. Australia’s oceans are teeming with sharks, with great whites topping the list of species that might fatally chomp a human. Undeterred, Australians flock to the sea in huge numbers — with a survey last year showing that nearly two-thirds of the population made a total of 650 million coastal visits in a single year. Many beach lovers accept the risks. When a shark killed surfer Mercury Psillakis off a northern Sydney beach last
‘CHILD PORNOGRAPHY’: The doll on Shein’s Web site measure about 80cm in height, and it was holding a teddy bear in a photo published by a daily newspaper France’s anti-fraud unit on Saturday said it had reported Asian e-commerce giant Shein (希音) for selling what it described as “sex dolls with a childlike appearance.” The French Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) said in a statement that the “description and categorization” of the items on Shein’s Web site “make it difficult to doubt the child pornography nature of the content.” Shortly after the statement, Shein announced that the dolls in question had been withdrawn from its platform and that it had launched an internal inquiry. On its Web site, Le Parisien daily published a
RSS