Andrew Natsios Resigns

Andrew Natsios, the author of The Great North Korean Famine and the only senior U.S. official who likely understands the true nature and urgency of the food situation in the North, is leaving his post as Director of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). He does so at an ominous moment, just as the famine threatens to return.

WASHINGTON, Dec 2 (Reuters) – Andrew Natsios, the head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, will leave his post for a teaching job at Georgetown University, a State Department official said on Friday.

“Administrator Natsios has been an aggressive reformer, and his work has saved and bettered lives in every corner of the globe,” said James Wilkinson, senior adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. He said Rice asked Natsios to stay “but he felt it was time for new challenges. She reluctantly accepted his resignation, but told him to keep his uniform ready.”

Natsios will leave the job, which oversees millions of dollars in U.S. development assistance, in January 2006 to become distinguished professor in the practice of diplomacy at Georgetown’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service.

No replacement has been announced.

You can read more of Natsois’s views on the subject of food aid to the North here, but I suggest you start with his book. Natsios is a strong proponent of giving food aid to the North, as well as of stricter monitoring of its distribution. My sixth sense tells me that his resignation is connected to some unreported dispute behind this report:

Washington has halted the purchase of 25,000 tons of food aid it had pledged for North Korea this year, half its total commitment, saying it has no way of making sure where the aid goes.

The U.S. State Department said Thursday it was uncertain whether the UN World Food Program would receive the shipment, while there was also no mechanism left to ensure that the food gets to those who need it. As a result, the U.S. did not even buy the 25,000 tons scheduled to be shipped at the end of November.

The U.S. Agency for International Development had previously warned Washington would stop its food aid if North Korean authorities insist on an end to all monitoring of food aid distribution by the WFP.

Since North Korea demanded an end to humanitarian aid work and the withdrawal of aid groups from the country, the WFP has been negotiating about the scale of next year’s relief efforts, the number of foreign residents who can stay in North Korea, and the conditions for the development aid Pyongyang now says it wants instead.

Stay tuned for more on this. I will try to reach out to Natsois myself and see what I can find out.

Meanwhile, I will simply link to Dr. Andrei Lankov’s latest publication on aid to the North. I haven’t read it myself, but knowing Dr. Lankov’s past work, I have no doubt it’s a must-read.