World Food Program Cuts Assistance to North Korea

The World Food Program has been forced to cut off aid to 2.7 million North Korean women and children during the height of their country’s harsh winter because of a lack of foreign donations, an agency spokesman said Monday.

The U.N. agency received new promises of aid from the United States, the European Union and Australia after warning in December of an impending crisis, but those supplies could take up to three months to arrive, spokesman Gerald Bourke said. The agency is trying to feed nearly a third of North Koreans.

Aid shortfalls forced the WFP to start cutting food distributions in December to more than half of its 4.2 million “core beneficiaries” -- children, pregnant women and elderly people, Bourke said.

Already in December, he said, “there were quite a few people we were not able to feed.”

North Korea’s Stalinist regime has relied on foreign aid since revealing in the mid-1990s that its state-run farming industry had collapsed after decades of mismanagement and the loss of Soviet subsidies.