NORTH KOREA: The UN's World Food Programme is planning to resume operations in North Korea, two months after the humanitarian agency and other NGOs, including Ireland's Concern, were kicked out of the secretive Stalinist state.
"We've approval in principle by our donors and, given the humanitarian needs, we need to be there," said Gerry Bourke, WFP spokesman in Beijing, "but we're concerned about the operating conditions and we need to hammer out a better deal relating to access, the number of people and monitoring."
WFP's executive director James Morris said: "If we cannot reach a suitable final agreement on our operating conditions, we will be forced to withdraw."
The North Korean government in Pyongyang ordered all foreign aid agencies out of the country at the end of last year, citing better harvests and fears of dependency culture emerging from emergency aid. Pyongyang also complained that the WFP's monitoring was intrusive and in future it would only accept development aid that addressed medium- and long-term needs.
North Korea's economy is on the edge of bankruptcy and there are fears of a humanitarian disaster if harvests should fail as they did in 1995 and if it is internationally sanctioned over its nuclear programme.
Donors such as the US and Japan will give food aid but only on condition it does not help to prop up the regime of the "Dear Leader", Kim Jong-il, nor do they want food aid being used to feed North Korea's huge army.
Bilateral contributors such as China and South Korea contribute without strings attached.
The WFP's executive board, which is made up of the 36 donor countries, said it was concerned about restrictions on monitoring and access that the North Korean government has imposed. As it stands, operations will be considerably reduced. There will probably be 10 people overseeing the operations, whereas in the past the WFP has had 47 or 48, and the number of monitoring visits will be cut from about 400 a month to a much more limited number.
The plan is valued at €86 million and provides cereals, rice and other vitamin-enriched foods for nearly two million North Koreans.
Over the 10 years, the WFP, the world's largest humanitarian agency, has provided more than 90 per cent of humanitarian aid for North Korea and has supported up to one-third of the population of 23 million.