Europe to send urgent food aid to North Korea

Priority given to feeding children on brink of starvation, mothers, hospital patients and elderly

guardian.co.uk, Maev Kennedy, Monday 4 July 2011

Pyongyang in North Korea. Government food rations have been reduced
to the equivalent of a small bowl of rice per day.
Photograph: Dan Chung for the Guardian

The European commission is to give €10m (£9m) in urgent food aid to North Koreans on the brink of starvation, after negotiating for "unprecedented access" to ensure that the food goes straight to those most in need.

The money will be used to buy food, through the World Food Programme and Save the Children, which will be directed to 650,000 children in hospitals and care homes, breastfeeding women, hospital patients and the elderly.

"It is of course outrageous that year after year the North Korean government has been starving its own people while funding programmes that are not to the benefit of the people and certainly not for the benefit of mankind – but that is no excuse for closing our eyes and closing our hearts when people are in desperate need," Kristalina Georgieva, EU commissioner for international co-operation, humanitarian aid and crisis response, said. "My own team came back and told me that the need is very real and acute. If we are to act, we must act now."

North Korean government rations, believed to be keeping two-thirds of the population alive, have been steadily reducing, down from 400g per person per day in April to 150g in June – the equivalent of a small bowl of rice.

Georgieva sent observers who were given unusual permission to visit hospitals and clinics, kindergartens and nurseries, markets and farms, and the state food distribution centres. They reported widespread hunger, near-empty markets and warehouses, and many people being treated in hospital after eating grass.

"Among the most saddening stories were of starving children begging in the market place to people who had absolutely nothing to give them. We cannot allow that to happen if we are in a position to help," she said.

Georgieva has been in discussion with the World Food Programme, which is using the offer of European money as a lever to increase the number of international staff in the country monitoring food distribution, and to permit up to 400 visits a month, including members of her own team.

"This is a targeted, one-off response. We will be monitoring from port to hospital. I have asked that all the food from Europe be not bought at the same time: any sign of food not getting through, or being diverted away from the people we want to help, and it stops there, we give no more," Georgieva said.

Between 1995 and 2008 the commission spent around €124m on humanitarian aid to North Korea, but in 2008 closed its office in Pyongyang and pulled out all staff.

The present food crisis has been caused by the combination of floods last year, the coldest winter in 50 years, and then an outbreak of foot and mouth disease. The next main cereal harvest is not due until October.

A defector from North Korea recently gave the Guardian searing accounts of life in a detention camp where she was imprisoned for a previous escape from the country.

"There were about 1,000 women in our cabin and we were so squashed together we had to sleep with our legs interlocking," she said. "We had rice husks to eat and had to work cutting down trees and dragging the timber back with chains. When it got really cold in winter, five or six women would die every day and the other prisoners would have to carry the bodies out. I still dream about that."

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