The World Food Programme (WFP) is shutting down its food aid program in North Korea as it moves from feeding people to offering development aid following Pyongyang's request, officials said yesterday.
"We're very much sort of in a closure mode on the humanitarian side," Richard Ragan, the WFP's country director for North Korea, told reporters in Beijing.
The UN relief agency has closed down the 19 food processing plants it operated in the country as well as its five sub-offices, Ragan said.
"We've stopped our programs. We will not feed anybody past the end of December ... We're only feeding 600,000 people today out of 6.5 million people [the WFP had been feeding]," Ragan said.
The WFP has been helping to feed the hungry in North Korea since famine in the mid-1990s killed an estimated 2 million people.
North Korea announced in early August that it no longer required food assistance from the WFP and other overseas aid groups from next month, despite international concerns of widespread starvation in the country.
WFP officials said they still believe food shortages in the North exist, but the government seems confident it can cope thanks to recent better harvests in the country, as well as food aid from China and South Korea.
The head of the WFP, James Morris, who just returned from a two-day trip to Pyongyang, said North Korea had asked the WFP to stay in the country and provide development assistance instead.
The WFP has agreed, and is now negotiating with Pyongyang on the conditions.
"They clearly want us to stay and we want to stay," Morris told reporters at the press conference. "But we have to be able to stay in a context that will give us a chance to be successful and to continue our focus on the most vulnerable, usually women and children, the poorest people, the most at-risk people."
Negotiations have stumbled over the size of the WFP expatriate staff and the organization's high standards of monitoring where the aid is going, Morris said.
"They have concerns about the number of international staff we will have there," Morris said.
The WFP currently has 34 staff members in North Korea, including two who are locally hired. The number of staff the WFP wants to have in the future will depend on the type of development program it will run, officials said.
"Having the right number of people and adequate number of people is very important," Morris said. "We hope to work through this in the next few weeks."
Morris said Pyongyang has asked the WFP to provide assistance in agricultural development, which would include building infrastructure such as irrigation systems, as well as roads to allow farmers to transport their crops.
The WFP between 1995 and last year provided North Korea with nearly 4 million tonnes of food, valued at up to US$1.7 billion, to feed 6.5 million people a year, out of a population of 23 million. The aid, the largest-ever WFP program, has been sustaining the reclusive country since successive years of famine brought it to its knees 10 years ago as the economy collapsed when support from the former Soviet Union dried up.
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