|
North Korea has said it will no longer accept food aid from the international community and has demanded that the UN World Food Program shut its Pyongyang office and withdraw its monitors. The country¡¯s grain production last year was about 4.2 million tons, more than 900,000 tons short of demand, which is why this year it accepted 500,000 tons of aid from the South, 150,000 tons from China and 100,000 tons from the WFP.
It appears that a country where every grain of rice is precious is turning up its nose at international aid because the scale of aid is growing smaller even as monitoring has grown stricter. At the same time, South Korean aid to the North has increased from 400,000 tons last year to 500,000 tons, but monitoring by Seoul is a mere formality. Pyongyang would thus much rather depend on the South than on the pesky international community.
The WFP, under the principle of "No Access, No Food," mobilized some 100 staff and carried out 4,800 on-the-spot inspections last year, while South Korea carried out a grand total of 10. WFP agents even visit North Korean families, while the South Korean officials who go to the North bringing food will, at most, listen to what the officials in charge of food distribution centers have to say.
This being the case, it is only natural that U.S. Korea expert Marcus Noland recently pointed out that South Korea's and China's unconditional food aid to the North harms the food distribution transparency international bodies have built up over the last 10 years. Noland is a researcher at the Institute for International Economics who wrote "Hunger and Human Rights: The Politics of Famine in North Korea." Estimates showed that 25-30 percent of the food aid given North Korea is not reaching ordinary citizens but is going to North Korea's official class instead.
Billions of won in taxpayers¡¯ money go into food aid to the North, and there's hardly a person who opposes helping starving compatriots. But if international bodies with proper monitoring systems have to be kicked out of North Korea because of South Korean aid, that is something that cannot be overlooked. Those who give aid have the moral responsibility to make sure that it goes to the North Koreans who most need it.
|
