Go to Key Stories

U.S. Says It Will Double Food Aid to North Korea

The Clinton administration announced yesterday that it will roughly double a previous U.S. donation of food aid to North Korea's famished populace, by dispatching an estimated 100,000 tons of grain worth $27 million to children and the elderly through the United Nations World Food Program and various independent groups.

The U.S. decision comes three weeks before a crucial meeting in New York of North Korean, South Korean, Chinese and U.S. officials to decide the timing, location and agenda for future negotiations on a permanent peace treaty ending the 1950-53 Korean War -- a negotiation that North Korea has frequently linked to the provision of additional food aid.

U.S. officials publicly denied any connection between the aid and forthcoming talks. But privately, officials have said that Washington's past assistance has improved substantially the political climate for the negotiations. In February, Washington donated $25 million to the U.N. program for North Korea.

The new donation amounts to slightly more than half the $45.6 million sought by the World Food Program in its most recent appeal for assistance, issued July 9. In making that appeal, Catherine Bertini, the program's director, specifically called attention to the worsening plight of children in a famine brought on by two years of flooding that destroyed many crops and by a highly inefficient agricultural system.

Bertini said members of the program's 15-person staff in North Korea "estimate that 50 to 80 percent of the children they have seen in nurseries are underweight and markedly smaller than they should be for their age. They are literally wasting away." A shortage of resources has kept hospitals from treating the children unless they have a famine-related illness, such as diarrhea or pneumonia.

The program's ambition is to more than double the food rations it provides to 2.6 million children age 6 or younger, to compensate for a reduction in the rations supplied by the communist government, and to increase its monitoring staff by 10. It would also provide additional rations to an estimated million hospital patients.

State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns said the administration is confident the new aid will not be diverted to other, less needy groups in North Korea. Much of the new assistance will be in corn, which is regarded primarily as an animal feed in North Korea and is unlikely to be skimmed off by elites there, according to independent experts.

One expert on famines, Andrew S. Natsios of World Vision, recently returned from a week-long trip to North Korea during which he saw "hundreds of people foraging for wild . . . foods on roadsides and [in] forests, evidence of mass population movements [due to famine] . . . and 40 to 50 percent acute malnutrition rates in two orphanages and one kindergarten."

Natsios told a subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week that the administration's response to the crisis has been too restrained because of opposition from some U.S. lawmakers and pressure from South Korea, which he said "has consistently and openly opposed any significant food aid to their adversaries in the North."

Natsios, who was formerly the Bush administration's top food and humanitarian expert at the U.S. Agency for International Development, noted that Washington typically provides a quarter to a third of the food required to alleviate foreign famines. But the U.S. contributions to date in North Korea amount to roughly 10 percent of the shortfall.

"We are very pleased," Natsios said about the announcement. "The United States is finally stepping up to the plate and assuming its leadership role, which it should have done before." He added, however, that in North Korea, "it is literally true that politics is killing people" because the international response has been so slow.