UN cuts food aid to North Korea

PYONGYANG, June 5 (Itar-Tass) - The UN World Food Programme needs additional means for its two-year aid plan for North Korea effective until June 2015, WFP Pyongyang representative Dierk Stegen told Tass on Thursday. He said the mission had received only 24 percent of the necessary $200 million. The program has been cut, and at the present time 840,000 Koreans, mainly children, receive food aid, while the organization seeks to involve some 1.6-1.7 million Korean children and women in the program. Up until recently, UN food aid intended for nursing mothers, pregnant women and small children, whose ratio is not rich in proteins, fats and vitamins, has been sent to 87 counties of the country. The United Nations supplies North Korea with vegetable oil, soya beans, sugar, iodized salt and infants’ food. However, because of insufficient funding, five of 15 plants producing baby food on agreements with the UN World Food Programme were closed in March. Stegen said Australia, Canada, Switzerland and Scandinavian countries were among the donors. At the moment, every North Korean citizen depending on centralized distribution of food is entitled to 410 grams of grain a day, while the UN norm is 600 grams. Dry weather has settled in some regions of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, which may affect wheat, corn and potato crops. The North Korean agricultural industry is rated as high-risk because of regular floods, droughts and typhoons. However, insufficiency in food is caused by the reduction of foreign humanitarian aid rather than by nature. The United States, Japan and South Korea, which were earlier among the main donors, have scrapped food aid for political reasons, Stegen said. Learn more on itar-tass.com