North Korea's demand that food aid be terminated and changed into development assistance underlines the regime's desire for a long-term strategy for feeding its people and becoming less dependent on foreign help, according to experts on the country.
The North, emerging from a famine that killed 2 million people by some estimates, announced last week that it wanted all emergency humanitarian assistance from international organizations to stop by the end of the year, in part because of what it called political interference from the US.
In line with the North's request, the UN World Food Program (WFP), which provides food assistance to about 6.5 million North Koreans, said earlier it would end a decade of emergency food shipments by January and focus on development projects.
"North Korea has survived a life-and-death situation where people starved to death and there is now some stability, albeit at a minimum level," said Paik Hak-soon of the Sejong Institute in Seoul. "They now want a long-term survival strategy."
North Koreans would want development assistance rather than "aid that can be consumed and simply disappear," Paik said.
The nation of 22 million people has relied on foreign assistance since natural disasters and mismanagement caused its economy to collapse in the mid-1990s. Nearly US$2 billion in food aid has flowed into the country over the last decade, according to a report by the US Committee for Human Rights in North Korea.
The food situation has improved in recent years, but not enough for aid groups to end their humanitarian work, Undersecretary-General Jan Egeland, the UN humanitarian affairs coordinator, warned on Friday.
As part of its transition, the WFP said it plans to halt production at its 19 fortified-food factories in the North in mid-November.
"The decision follows last week's request by [North Korean] authorities that all food distributions and monitoring activities under the current emergency operation be completed by the end of November," the WFP said in a report dated Friday.
The agency said some 2,100 workers, 90 percent of whom are women, would be affected.
Analysts stress the North is not asking for a halt to food assistance, but for programs that will grant more independence -- central to its guiding national ideology of "juche," or self-reliance.
While the US insists it does not use food aid as a political tool, its recently appointed special envoy on North Korea's human rights, Jay Lefkowitz, suggested earlier this month that future US aid might be linked to thuman rights.
Some have also raised concerns that the North may be preparing to expel foreign aid workers to escape monitoring of food aid deliveries. Donors worry that supplies might be diverted to North Korea's 1 million-member military or the country's elite rather than those most in need.
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