North Korea's nuclear and missile tests mean donations to the impoverished country are drying up, a situation that could leave millions vulnerable to hunger as winter approaches, aid officials there said yesterday.
The Red Cross and World Food Programme (WFP) called on donors to look beyond North Korea's provocations and continue to provide needed aid, as it faces grain harvests hurt by severe flooding and a drop in assistance from neighbours China and South Korea.
"All indications seem to point to the fact that the harvest will not be as good as last year and the year before," Jean-Pierre de Margerie, the WFP's North Korea Country Representative, said from Pyongyang.
"Humanitarian aid should not be influenced by the political situation," Jaap Timmer, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies' head of delegation in Pyongyang, said. South Korea suspended donations of aid in July, following the North's missile tests.
Mr de Margerie said the balance due on a one-off flood relief package from Seoul was now also on hold. Donations from China were also down by 60 per cent this year, he said.
"We're supposed to assist 1.9 million North Koreans, and right now, with the limited resources we have, we can barely assist one million of them."
Even in a good year, North Korea falls about 1 million tonnes short of the food it needs to feed its people. South Korea provided 500,000 tonnes of rice last year but rebuffed a request for the same amount earlier this year.
The UN food agency drastically scaled back its programme earlier this year, to a target of 75,000 tonnes of food aid annually from 500,000 tonnes.
That came after a compromise with North Korea after the government said it no longer wanted handouts and disagreements over the conditions for supplying aid.