NK Ends WFP Aid
North Korea has decided to kick out the World Food Program
North Korea has said it will no longer accept food aid from the international community and has demanded that the UN World Food Program shut its Pyongyang office and withdraw its monitors. The country’s grain production last year was about 4.2 million tons, more than 900,000 tons short of demand, which is why this year it accepted 500,000 tons of aid from the South, 150,000 tons from China and 100,000 tons from the WFP.
So why is a country that faces continuing starvation of it’s citizens kicking out the WFP? Here is why:
It appears that a country where every grain of rice is precious is turning up its nose at international aid because the scale of aid is growing smaller even as monitoring has grown stricter. At the same time, South Korean aid to the North has increased from 400,000 tons last year to 500,000 tons, but monitoring by Seoul is a mere formality. Pyongyang would thus much rather depend on the South than on the pesky international community.
The WFP, under the principle of “No Access, No Food,” mobilized some 100 staff and carried out 4,800 on-the-spot inspections last year, while South Korea carried out a grand total of 10. WFP agents even visit North Korean families, while the South Korean officials who go to the North bringing food will, at most, listen to what the officials in charge of food distribution centers have to say.
I have to commend the UN World Food Program for finally conducting stricter inspections. The WFP has been criticized in the past for not conducting enough monitoring of where the food is going. Obviously they must be doing a better job if the North Koreans have kicked them out.
I do find the fact that South Korea is handing food over to the North Korean regime with virtually no inspections reprehensible. Only a fool would think that this food is going to starving civilians. This food is going directly to the ruling class and the military in North Korea that are the ones responsible for the famine and human rights violations in the first place and South Korea knows it. They call this the Sunshine Policy of friendly engagement with the North, but it sounds more like common bribery to me.
Another good report GI. Another example of something I wouldn't have known about back here in the USA if you hadn't highlighted it here.
When a similar discussion to this (ie food aid to DPRK) happened on another Korean blog (I can't remember which one, or when), somebody scornfully chose to make a point about how bags of grain and common foodstuffs sent into the North by the outside world were not being served directly onto the table of the ruling elite or the Army.
So let me preempt that point by saying that food aid is "fungible". Any relief at all, anywhere into the system helps to relieve the "pressure" in the overall system.
Whoa, Songun snuck that one in on me while I was typing! (3 minutes difference in posting).
I confess I had forgotten about the "children-eating" option. Songun, old bean, allow me to refer you to one of the writings of Jonathan Swift (18th century Anglo-Irish author, most famous as the author of "Gulliver's Travels").
In "A Modest Proposal" (1729) he sarcastically suggested that the starving Irish people be taught to use their own children for food.
http://art-bin.com/art/omodest.html
In the polite society of the UN, Songun, it's still considered rather "gauche" for you to so blatantly accuse we Americans of being "baby-eaters". A little too "over-the-top"; a more subtle way of showing your "erudition" would be to merely suggest that the Americans have a "modest proposal" for the people of Iraq.
That will raise a knowing smile amongst the world's educated elites; after all, they are the ones you want to impress, since your own Korean mass populace are unlikely to be regular readers here.
Great post on a starving country ruled by a monster. I wish we could liberate these people, but the new "appeasers" in charge in South Korea have become the North's "enablers".