NORTH KOREA: Donor nations suspect that food aid is being diverted away from the needy to the country's military, reports Clifford Coonan in Beijing.
Nearly four million North Koreans are facing a hungry winter because foreign donors are not giving enough food aid to the isolated communist country, the head of the UN World Food Programme (WFP) said at the weekend.
As the first snows fall in North Korea's bitter, sub-zero winter, 17 per cent of the population of the would-be nuclear power could be deprived of critical international food aid because of global cutbacks in donations.
"The situation in North Korea is challenging at best. We have about 60 per cent of what we need to do our work. That means in January we'll probably stop feeding about three million people," James T Morris, executive director of the world's largest humanitarian agency, told a briefing in Beijing.
"We have a gift coming from Russia that will enable us to pick up the gap for a month. And then if we don't have additional support, we'll reduce our level of activity by something in the neighbourhood of 3.8 million people in February," Mr Morris warned.
The shortfall comes amid a standoff over North Korea's nuclear weapons programmes and other disputes that have tested international patience with the communist regime.
North Korea has depended on foreign food aid since it confessed in the mid-1990s that its state-run farming industry had collapsed after decades of mismanagement and the loss of subsidies following the demise of its main patron, the Soviet Union.
Most of North Korea's 23 million people are extremely poor, with food, clean water, power and medical services in short supply. In some parts, food is so scarce that fields are guarded.
North Korea's dwindling public distribution system, which is a key source of food for urban residents with no access to farmland or forests, is allowing for just 300 grams of food per person per day next year, which is less than half a survival ration, the WFP says.
North Korea maintains a cult around its leader, Kim Jong Il, the Dear Leader, who took over after his father Kim Il Sung, the Great Leader, died in 1994.
The WFP, which fed a record 110 million people in 82 countries this year, has launched an emergency appeal this month for $171 million worth of rations for Kim's country. The food is needed for 6.5 million people, mostly women and children. Aid agencies don't know when the isolated North's people will be able to survive without donated food.
Donor nations, particularly the world's richest, the United States, suspect that food aid is diverted away from the needy to the country's 1.1 million-member military. North Korea is the most militarised country in the world relative to its population.
Donors have grown impatient with the North Korean government in the capital Pyongyang over its attempts to build nuclear weapons.
Japan, once the North's biggest donor, has given nothing for the past two years because of the North's nuclear programme and abductions of Japanese citizens years ago.
The timing of a second round of six-way talks to rein in the North's nuclear arms programme is still uncertain. In a rare show of multilateral diplomatic leadership, China hosted an initial round of inconclusive negotiations with the United States, North and South Korea, Japan and Russia in August.
Worried by the prospect of a crumbling North Korea on its north-eastern border, Beijing has been trying to bring the parties together for a follow-up round.
Chinese and US officials met in Beijing last week to discuss the way forward.
Mr Morris said that as well as Pyongyang's extremely fraught relationship with foreign governments, fund-raising efforts were undermined by the North's reluctance to let outsiders monitor food distribution.
"Normally, we distribute our food through a system of nongovernmental organizations, NGO partners. Some local, some international," he said.
"We don't have those same kinds of partners in North Korea, so it's essentially done through a public distribution system. We've been asking for a list of the hospitals and the orphanages and the schools and the other institutions that receive our food. We simply want a list of where our food is going. For two years, they've not been able to give us that list," he said.
The WFP is discussing with Washington a possible donation worth $4.2 million, he said, but donors were skeptical about giving money to such a closed, non-transparent country.
US food aid to North Korea has fallen from a high of more than 300,000 tonnes per year to 40,000 in 2003. A decision on next year's donation has yet to be reached and Pyongyang believes Washington is using aid as a weapon.
"The issues are not essentially political issues or military issues or nuclear issues. They're issues of North Korea's need to be accountable, accessible and transparent like every other country we serve in the world," Mr Morris said.
Despite this, the agency's aid network was growing, with new areas of the country receiving aid.
"Now, we've made progress. We added an additional county this year, and we're now serving 163 out of 206 counties in the country. But everywhere else we work we go everywhere," he said.
"Our only objective is to feed the hungry poor. We don't want to go anywhere for any reason other than feeding hungry people, especially vulnerable women and children," Mr Morris said.
Trust is poor. While the WFP had upped the number of monitoring visits to around 500 a month, all of the visits needed state approval and often the monitoring teams were accompanied by government agents. "Nowhere else in the world do we have that kind of process in play," he said.
Compounding crop failures, South Korean officials say price reforms introduced in July last year had caused the official price of rice roughly to double, but the increase was 10-fold on the black market.
Mr Morris said the WFP had made substantial progress since its arrival in North Korea. "We've been there since 1995, and there's not been substantial famine death, loss of life from the lack of food, since we've been there," said Mr Morris.
A survey conducted jointly with UNICEF on the nutrition and health of children under the age of seven showed that the number of underweight children declined from 60 per cent in 1998 to 20 per cent last year.
The percentage of wasted children, or acutely malnourished children, had decreased from 16 per cent to 9 per cent, while the percentage of chronically malnourished children, or stunted children, had decreased from 60 per cent to 40.
"So, enormous progress. Number one, no significant loss of life because of hunger, and two, dramatic improvement in the nutritional health of children", he said. Long-term, the outlook for North Korea is not seen as positive.
The credit ratings agency Standard And Poor's says it is only a matter of time before North Korea collapses because its economic model was not sustainable. Financial analysts put North Korea's gross domestic product at just 3 per cent of that of South Korea.
Information from South Korea, which tends to give the most reliable picture of what is happening behind the closed borders, shows things may have improved slightly since reforms were introduced last year, but most regional strategic analysts remain pessimistic.
Aid workers and business travellers say they have seen some improvements in parts of Pyongyang, such as improved street lighting, more vendors and markets, but that the situation remains desperate.