After Poor Harvest, U.N. Warns N. Korean Food Shortage Will Worsen

Food shortages in chronically hungry North Korea are expected to worsen sharply this year after a meager 2000 harvest and a disastrous winter, a senior U.N. aid official said Monday.

“We expect the year 2001 to be the most difficult since 1998,” David Morton, the World Food Program’s representative in North Korea, told a news conference in Beijing.

The 2000 harvest fell 1.8 million tons short of the 4.8 million tons needed to sustain North Korea’s 22 million people, he said. State food distribution pipelines mostly dried up in January, five months earlier than last year.

The state is now delivering small amounts of South Korean food aid, which will run out next month, Morton said.

“After that, the public distribution system will have virtually nothing to distribute,” he said. “We expect these shortages to impact on the people from now onwards till the next harvest, which will be in October-November.”

Plagued by food shortages, North Korea has been dependent on foreign aid since disastrous floods and droughts in 1995-96 compounded weaknesses in its rigid collective farming system.

The U.N. World Food Program, or WFP, is feeding about 8 million North Koreans, including 6 million children, Morton said.

Malnutrition among children is “easy to find” in the Communist country, with a majority underweight and undersized, but their overall condition has improved as a result of years of aid targeting the young through schools, he said.

Morton said the state distribution centers are gearing up to deliver “alternative foods”--low-nutrition noodles or cakes made of grain husks, grain and enzymes that have caused digestive ills in the past.

Some relief is also on the way from winter wheat harvests, spring vegetables and newly introduced crops, such as potatoes.

Despite stiff government controls on foreign aid workers that have kept 44 of North Korea’s 211 counties off limits to monitoring, Morton said that “the general consensus is that the aid is generally reaching the people.”

Normalization of North Korea’s ties with New Zealand and many European countries probably has contributed to greater aid flows, notably from Japan and from South Korea, Morton said.

As for the U.S., Morton said he hopes American aid will continue despite tough talk on the North Koreans’ missile program from the Bush administration.

The U.S. government accounted for more than 52% of the cash and more than 55% of the grain contributed to WFP operations in North Korea between July 1999 and December 2000, WFP data showed.