From the Financial Times:
China’s food aid to North Korea soars
By Mure Dickie in Beijing
July 21 2006
China’s soaring cereal shipments to politically isolated North Korea made it the world’s third largest food donor last year, according to the United Nations World Food Programme.
The scale of China’s supplies of wheat, flour and coarse grains highlights the sensitive issue of Beijing’s support for a Pyongyang regime whose recent missile test launches have drawn international opprobrium.
It is likely to spur calls from the US and elsewhere for China to do more to push North Korea to rejoin international talks aimed at ending its nuclear weapons programme.
Pyongyang received more than 90 per cent of the 576,582 tons of cross-border food aid provided by China in 2005, according to data from the WFP’s International Food Aid Information System.
The shipments meant China’s total food donations climbed 260 per cent year-on-year and were surpassed only by those of the US and EU.
Beijing has long been North Korea’s most important supplier of fuel and food, but the World Food Progamme figures suggested a sharp increase in Pyongyang’s reliance on its traditional communist ally.
Chinese officials argue that they have little influence over Pyongyang, as shown by the limited results of their years of effort to persuade North Korean leaders to emulate Beijing’s economic reform and opening policies.
However, food aid from China and South Korea, which supplied nearly 400,000 tons, last year allowed North Korea to order international aid agencies out of the country, curtailing the work of the WFP itself. Seoul recently suspended shipments of humanitarian aid to the North in a response to the missile tests that was also linked by some observers to Pyongyang’s ejection of aid groups. Fears have since grown of another food crisis in North Korea, after typhoons and floods that have wiped out crops in some areas.
Chinese officials yesterday declined to comment on their plans for food donations to North Korea, with one official of the Ministry of Commerce saying: “I can’t tell you. It’s a state secret.”
From the New York Times:
The biggest recipient of [UNWFP aid] was Ethiopia, followed by North Korea and Sudan. The report is at www.wfp.org/interfais.
