Out With a Whimper: The World Food Program Abandons the North Korean People to Famine

Even last summer, with the World Food Program’s food aid flowing into North Korea, the country was suffering from food shortages. Today, North Korea’s frigid winter has set in, and the regime has almost completely evicted the WFP and the aid it provided. For thousands of North Korea’s underprivileged citizens–not counting the millions who starved for the sake of the regime’s nuclear buildup in the 1990’s–it is already too late. Yet the United Nations, through its anemic retreat from North Korea in the face of a preventable famine, continues to undermine the justification for its own existence by failing to even raise its voice on behalf of the vulnerable:

The World Food Programme (WFP) is shutting down its food aid programme in North Korea as it moves from feeding people to offering development aid following Pyongyang’s request, officials said. “We’re very much sort of in a closure mode on the humanitarian side,” Richard Ragan, the WFP’s country director for North Korea, told reporters in Beijing.

The UN relief agency has closed down the 19 food processing plants it operated in the country as well as its five sub-offices, Ragan said. “We’ve stopped our programmes. We will not feed anybody past the end of December . . . . We’re only feeding 600,000 people today out of 6.5 million people (WFP had been feeding),” Ragan said.

The WFP has been helping to feed the hungry in North Korea since famine in the mid-1990s killed an estimated two million people.

Note that the current figure of 600,000 recipients is down from 3.6 million just a month ago. The Seattle Times reports that even this trickle of aid will end with the year, and suggests the reasons for this ruthless move:

The World Food Program will halt humanitarian food aid to 6 million North Koreans at the end of this month because the North Korean government says it now has enough food to feed its hungry people, the WFP director said Thursday. The halt of the WFP assistance comes as North Korea expels about a dozen nongovernmental aid groups after European condemnation of its human-rights record.

The halting of the WFP aid appears to be the result of North Korean paranoia about foreigners wandering about in the country, increased economic aid from South Korea and China, and an uptick in agricultural output.

Even accepting the dubious claims of increased harvests and the increased aid from other sources as facts, it still won’t be sufficient to feed the underprivileged:

Morris said his agency thinks “there still is a food shortage in the country,” and that as many as a third of North Korean women remain anemic and in need of nutritional help. A 2004 survey found that 37 percent of the children were chronically malnourished, or “stunted,” and 7 percent of them were acutely malnourished, or “wasted,” Morris said.
. . . .
Even so, WFP food assistance for 6 million people is winding down and will halt entirely by Dec. 31, said Richard Ragan, the director for North Korea. Morris said North Korean officials had made it clear that the country wanted to slash the WFP’s international staff in the country. North Korea also chafed at WFP efforts to monitor food distribution to ensure that the aid arrived in the hands of those most in need.

Meanwhile, some of the mystery has been removed from North Korea’s demand for, and the WFP’s access to, a change from food aid to “development aid,” via ChannelNewsAsia:

The head of the WFP, James Morris, who just returned from a two-day trip to Pyongyang, said North Korea had asked WFP to stay in the country and provide development assistance instead. WFP has agreed, and is now negotiating with Pyongyang on the conditions.

“They clearly want us to stay and we want to stay,” Morris told reporters at the press conference. “But we have to be able to stay in a context that will give us a chance to be successful and to continue our focus on the most vulnerable, usually women and children, the poorest people, the most at-risk people.”

Negotiations have stumbled over the size of the WFP expatriate staff and the organisation’s high standards of monitoring where the aid is going, Morris said. “They have concerns about the number of international staff we will have there,” Morris said.

WFP currently has 34 staff members in North Korea including two who are locally hired. The number of staff WFP wants to have in the future will depend on the type of development programme it will run, officials said.

If your bullshit detector isn’t flashing and screeching by now, you need to change the batteries. It couldn’t be more obvious that no one has the slightest idea what this “development aid” will comprise, or how it will feed any hungry people. Lacking a knowledge of what will even be permitted, it’s obvious that in mid-December, as subzero temperatures are culling the sick and hungry, the WFP has absolutely no concrete plan to help them. Elsewhere in the world, there is no outrage and no compassion for the innocent victims of a regime that, after all, at least has anti-Americanism going for it.

Here is a short list of things that the WFP should have done two months ago, but has not done, and will not do:

• No public denunciation of the North Korean regime.
• No refusal to go along with the regime’s “development aid” farce.
• No declaration of a food emergency or of an impending famine.
• No public demand for China and South Korea to deliver their aid through the WFP.
• No public demand for feeding stations or refugee camps along the Chinese or South Korean borders.
• No threat to impose an arms embargo on a regime that has no business whatsoever buying, selling, or making arms.
• No threat of economic or trade sanctions unless the regime opens North Korea up to food distribution.
• No threat to hold North Korea’s leaders accountable before an international tribunal.

For its own part, the United States has made no public statements or offered any Security Council actions that would embarass the Chinese or North Korean governments for creating this new famine. Nor has the United States sought to embarass the South Korean government for its provision of direct, unmonitored food aid.