Tag: food aid

Via a reader tip comes news that the United Nations’ World Food Program plans to restart food aid to North Korea:

The U.N. World Food Program (WFP) will resume humanitarian food aid to 771,000 North Koreans, the Voice of America said Saturday, citing a WFP report. 

In the report, the WFP said it needs an estimated US$27.5 million from July to December to help the North handle the COVID-19 pandemic, and it lacks $3 million. 

The WFP said there was a need to find out what impact a two-month delay in North Korea reopening its schools had on the health of children in the reclusive state, given North Korean children usually receive 85 percent of their necessary nutrients from food provided by schools and public organizations.

Korea Times

You can read more at the link, but this food aid is just another sanctions busting scheme. The Kim regime can afford to feed their own people, but they choose not to. They would rather divert their resources to nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles and let the international community pick up the bill of feeding their malnourished people.

Here is a $8 million more dollars that the Kim regime does not have to spend on its people:

South Korea decided Friday to donate US$8 million to international agencies for aid projects in North Korea and allow a group of businesspeople to visit a shuttered joint industrial complex in the communist nation.
The decisions came as Seoul has been trying to keep the peace process with the North alive despite the North’s firing of missiles and projectiles earlier this month. Seoul is also formulating plans to send food aid to the impoverished North.
“The government decided to approve the businesspeople’s trip to North Korea as part of efforts to protect their property rights,” the unification ministry said in a press release. “We will make necessary efforts to make their trip to the Kaesong industrial complex go smoothly without any problem.”
“We also plan to provide $8 million through international agencies such as the WFP and UNICEF for projects to support the nutrition of children and pregnant women and their health,” it added, referring to the World Food Programme and the United Nations Children’s Fund.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link, but Seoul is saying they are sending the food aid to keep the peace process alive. So this is basically extortion money then to the Kim regime?

The North Korean economy should be put into receivership, like the Teamster's Union was in the 70s. Freeze all state actors' assets & release them to buy food, medicine & EAR-99 consumer goods only. Appoint an honest & experienced auditor to manage it. Call it coal-for-food. https://t.co/3QJXImP5wZ

— Joshua Stanton (@freekorea_us) November 20, 2018

Not that I don’t believe this is probably happening, but anonymous North Korean sources I always keep some skepticism about:

North Korea has been diverting U.N. food aid for its infants to other uses, a group of defectors from the communist state claimed Friday, stressing the need for stronger oversight over the humanitarian aid program.

The North Korea Intellectuals Solidarity said that North Korean officials have taken away powedered milk and other items for infants and toddlers, and provided them to ranking military and party officials, who then sold them on the black markets for profit.

“Many packs of flour and milk powder, which the United Nations has provided for North Korean infants, have been circulating on the market,” the group said, quoting an anonymous North Korean source.

“In the presence of outside monitoring staff, North Korean officials pretend to distribute food aid to infants as planned, but later they take it away,” the source was quoted by the group as saying.  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link.

Here we go again with yet another North Korea doesn’t have enough food story so lets give them free money:

SEOUL — As North Korea heads toward the “barley hump” – the lean season before the rice and corn harvest in the summer – aid agencies are warning that an unusually dry winter is compounding chronic food shortages in the impoverished country.

And while North Korea may no longer be in a state of famine, malnutrition remains such a widespread problem that even slight changes in weather can have an outsized impact on ordinary people’s food supply.

“We’re concerned about seed scarcity and the low level rain and snowfall,” John Aylieff, deputy Asia director at the U.N.’s World Food Program, said from Pyongyang. “All of these things are raising concerns about the winter harvest this year.”

Winter crops – including wheat and barley – should be growing now, but after an exceptionally dry year in 2014, rainfall around the country has been markedly lower than usual so far this year, particularly in the “cereal bowl” provinces of Pyongan in the west and Hwanghae in the south.

Although the winter harvest makes up only 5 percent of North Korea’s domestic food supply, it is a critical time because the crops see the country through the lean season known locally as the barley hump – the period between May and August before rice and corn crops are harvested.  [Washington Post]

You can read more at the link, but for a country that supposedly can’t afford its own food they sure do find ways to pay to develop plenty of new missiles and submarines.  Why should the world be forced to subsidize these military programs by buying food for the Kim regime?

Hopefully USAID continues to not give the Kim regime free money to feed their people with why they buy luxury goods and advance their nuclear and ballistic missile programs:

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) announced that it has no plans to provide assistance to the North, Radio Free America (RFA) reported Friday.

USAID is a public agency that orchestrated government aid to the reclusive nation in cooperation with the World Food Program (WFP) and civic groups.

USAID provided $1.5 million to Pyongyang in 2010 and 2011 to assist its recovery from floods.

But it stopped giving funds to the isolated nation in 2011.

“This is because there has been no large-scale natural disaster there that has needed external help since then,” the RFA quoted USAID spokesperson Raphael Cook as saying.

The U.S., the largest donor to the WFP’s North Korea aid program, has not contributed to it since 2009. Also, the WFP’s fundraising efforts have been hampered since the United Nations raised awareness of the North’s human rights violations last year.

A North Korea expert said the halting of aid may be a result of negative views of the North Korean leader’s spending on luxury goods each year instead of importing food for people there.  [Korea Times]

You can read more at the link.