WFP, North Korea disagree on food aids
(Reuters)
Updated: 2005-12-15 15:15

The World Food Program will stop feeding North Koreans by the end of this month and has yet to reach an agreement that will allow it to stay on in the country, the agency said on Thursday.

The UN agency has been in North Korea since a famine in the mid-1990s. It has been negotiating terms to stay on since the North announced in September it wanted emergency food aid shifted to development assistance.

"The government has concluded it no longer needs emergency humanitarian assistance," WFP executive director James Morris told a news conference in Beijing after two days of talks in Pyongyang.

Morris met government officials, including the agriculture and foreign ministers, for talks he described as "cordial" but which failed to yield a breakthrough.

"It's clear that they want us to stay and we want to stay but we have to be able to stay in a context that will give us a chance to be successful," Morris said.

The WFP is proposing a program that shifts the focus to development aid, but is negotiating with the North over the number of staff it can keep in the country and about its monitoring.

Morris declined to say how big a staff it wanted, saying only that the government wanted its presence to be "reduced from where it is, maybe considerably reduced." Diplomatic sources have said North Korea did not want the WFP to have more than 10.

"I suspect there would be some degree of discomfort (in North Korea) with people wandering about asking questions," Morris said. "My own view is that a staff of 32 people is a very small number is a country of between 21 and 23 million people."

During its 10 years in North Korea, the WFP grew into its biggest humanitarian agency and, with 47 international staff at its peak, one of the few windows on the outside world for the country.

North Korea is no longer facing famine, but Morris said about 37 percent of its children were malnourished, compared to more than 60 percent in 1998.

The WFP's program aimed to feed 6.5 million North Koreans but as it winds down in the absence of any clear mandate to continue, it is now feeding just 600,000.

"We've stopped our programs. We will not feed anyone past the end of December," the WFP's North Korea country director Richard Ragan told reporters.

"How it's going to impact over the long term is still a big question," he said.