Nuclear Plans May Put Food Aid for N. Korea at Risk

North Korea’s declared intention to resume its nuclear program has further jeopardized a critical lifeline to millions of the country’s most impoverished citizens whose survival could depend on international assistance, diplomats and aid officials said Monday.

“Obviously this can’t help,” commented an Asian-based aid specialist dealing with the issue, who declined to be named. “We can’t be optimistic.”

Another aid official said donor countries were showing reluctance to pledge new commitments of humanitarian assistance to North Korea for next year, in part because of the nuclear issue.

Although isolated from much of the world diplomatically, the hard-line communist country receives desperately needed humanitarian aid ranging from health and nutritional care to food grain, mainly through the United Nations.

Since the World Food Program first began delivering grain and rice to North Korea in the mid-1990s to ease suffering from years of famine, the project has grown to become the U.N. agency’s biggest ever. It began this year by targeting 6.4 million people -- about one-quarter of the country’s 24 million people.

However, the project’s first shortfall of donations -- one that began well before the present political crisis -- has forced it to cut the number of recipients by nearly half since September, according to Beijing-based World Food Program spokesman Gerald Bourke.

“These are among the most vulnerable of the vulnerable, including pregnant women and nursing mothers,” Bourke said.

A 1998 survey conducted after international aid began to flow found that nearly two-thirds of the children studied suffered from chronic malnutrition. While conditions are believed to have improved since then, the new escalation of tensions could quickly exacerbate conditions in the country, aid officials say.

As an indicator of the new pressure on North Korea, a Foreign Ministry spokesman in Pyongyang, the North’s capital, accused the United States on Monday of setting “unreasonable conditions” for continuing its food deliveries and “obstructing humanitarian aid by every possible means and method, even politicizing it.”

The spokesman, unnamed in the report carried by Pyongyang’s official Korean Central News Agency, also said the U.S. move was tied to the nuclear dispute.

“That’s wrong,” a senior State Department official said Monday, adding that President Bush has repeatedly stated that America will not use food as a weapon.

The United States this year shipped 155,000 tons of wheat to the North, making it the single largest contributor to the U.N.’s food assistance. But earlier this month, the Bush administration for the first time indicated that it might not respond to appeals for more aid next year unless Pyongyang allowed more monitoring of aid distribution.

“Who knows?” about the 2003 pledge, the State Department official said. “We don’t even have a budget yet.”

Andrew S. Natsios, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, warned in June, before the disclosures of North Korea’s uranium enrichment program, that “consideration of additional food aid to North Korea will depend on verifiable progress” in expanding access and improving monitoring of food aid distribution. But officials say North Korean transparency has not improved.

Tom McCarthy, a frequent visitor to North Korea who consults on agricultural issues, said, “It is true that the U.S. has faithfully complied with its commitments to provide aid to North Korea,” but the future is unclear.

“Nobody has ever denied that most of the food aid has gone to vulnerable populations,” McCarthy said. “The U.S. appears ready to politicize food aid.... At a moment of rising anti-Americanism in South Korea, the U.S. has decided to put the issue of feeding vulnerable North Korean children and elderly on the table.”

The current nuclear crisis with Pyongyang is virtually impossible to isolate from attitudes in potential donor countries, aid officials said.

North Korea’s announcement Thursday that it planned to restart its nuclear program marked the latest step in the unraveling of a 1994 agreement signed with the United States that at the time seemed to end a budding nuclear threat. Under that accord, known as the Agreed Framework, the U.S. offered to provide North Korea two new, safeguarded nuclear power plants along with shipments of heating oil to meet its energy needs, if Pyongyang agreed to freeze its own, potentially bomb-producing, nuclear facilities.

Speaking in Rotterdam on Sunday, former President Bill Clinton said Pyongyang at the time was planning to use plutonium from its nuclear plants to produce as many as eight bombs a year and that his administration had been ready to destroy North Korea’s nuclear plants if it had refused to accept the compromise solution.

Although the Agreed Framework held together for eight years, the deal was never far from controversy. It suffered a major blow in October when North Korea suddenly confessed that it was operating a weapons-oriented uranium enrichment project. The U.S., in consultation with key allies, including Japan and South Korea, responded by suspending heating oil shipments. A shipment that was due to arrive Sunday has been stopped.

In addition to demanding an end to restrictions on the monitoring of food aid disbursement, the Bush administration has called for broader distribution across the country as well as a study to determine the impact of the assistance.

Speaking by telephone from Beijing, World Food Program spokesman Bourke said that U.N. monitors operating in North Korea this year had been able to increase their visits to distribution sites by about one-third and to meet for the first time with small groups of aid recipients to better understand their needs.

In October, more than 6,000 mother-child pairs were checked in the first nutritional survey in four years, Bourke said. He added that the results would be available next month.

“It’s a significant step,” he said. “It will help us a lot in directing our aid.”

Whether these measures will be enough to meet U.S. demands in the present climate is unclear.

Even if the Bush administration commits the U.S. to sending food for 2003, last year’s suspension of aid from major donor Japan amid deteriorating bilateral ties with Pyongyang will make it hard to meet U.N. targets, Bourke said.

In Tokyo on Monday, Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe said Japan had no plans to authorize new food aid shipments.

“The World Food Program recently reported that it is short ... of food aid, but Japan is not considering anything whatsoever,” Abe said.

Abe indicated that any easing of ties with Pyongyang hinged on the release of families of Japanese nationals abducted by North Korean agents during the 1970s.

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Times staff writer Sonni Efron in Washington and Tokyo researcher Takashi Yokota contributed to this report.