North Korean Economy Watch

UPDATE 3: The JoongAng Daily (2/12/2011) reports on comments made by Robert King:

King explained that in the past, the U.S. had agreed to give North Korea 500,000 tons in food aid, but was only able to give 170,000 tons as North Korea refused the rest and ordered foreigners who had entered North Korea to deliver the aid to leave.

The envoy also said that it has not yet been decided whether the U.S. will grant food aid to the North and that three prerequisites must be fulfilled if it does.

The three conditions, he explained, are whether a real demand for food truly exists in North Korea, whether the North’s need for food is on the same level as other countries in need of aid, and whether monitoring of the aid will be securely guaranteed. Only when these three prerequisites are met can the U.S. grant aid, King said.

UPDATE 2: According to the JoongAng Daily (2/9/2011) the North Koreans have made an official request for food aid to the US government:

North Korean deputy ambassador to the UN, Han Sang-ryol, requested U.S. food aid last month through Robert King, the U.S. special envoy for North Korean human rights, a diplomatic source told the JoongAng Ilbo yesterday.

Local analysts suspect that King, who is currently in Seoul, informed the South Korean government of the request and is discussing a joint response to it.

“Ambassador Han met King in New York on Jan. 14 and requested large-scale U.S. food aid for the North,” said the diplomatic source in Washington.

It is the first time in years that a behind-the-scenes diplomatic discussion between Pyongyang and Washington on aid has come to the surface. U.S. food aid to the North has been suspended since March 2009 after the Kim Jong-il regime rejected a U.S. proposal to increase the number of Korean-speaking food-distribution monitors to make sure aid was getting to the public.

Han told King that the North was willing to enhance international monitoring of food aid “as much as the U.S. wants,” the source said.

King, who came to Seoul on Sunday, started meetings with Seoul officials yesterday, including Wi Sung-lac, the top envoy on North Korean nuclear issues. At a brief media conference after the meeting with Wi, King did not elaborate on the purpose of his visit or his discussion with the South Korean envoy, saying only it was “very good, very serious and a very thoughtful discussion.”

When asked whether food assistance to the North was on the agenda, King said they “talked about a lot of issues.”

“[It is] extremely important for the U.S., as we pursue our policies toward North Korea, to coordinate with the government of South Korea,” King said. “We have a close working relationship, we are able to work together well on issues, we share our analysis, we share our ideas in terms of making progress.”

The official United States stance, as U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell said earlier this month, is that it does not have a plan to resume food aid to the North for now.

“The U.S. does not think the North has met conditions to get U.S. food aid,” the source said.

And even if Washington decides to resume aid, it will take time because of congressional procedures, the source said. But some analysts see the possibility of change, citing some opinions in the U.S. State Department in favor of engaging the North with aid to sway its attitude on other issues, including denuclearization.

UPDATE 1: According to the Donga Ilbo (2/6/2011):

The U.S.-based Radio Free Asia says the U.S. government and nongovernmental organizations are discussing the resumption of food aid to North Korea.

Quoting diplomatic sources in the U.S., the broadcaster said Washington has not decided to resume food aid to Pyongyang but is having many talks and discussions on the issue.

Voice of America said Friday that the World Food Program and the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, both of which are under U.S. influence, also plan an additional survey of the North`s food situation for about a month from Feb. 10.

In an interview, Dr. Kisan Gunjal of the food organization said he will survey the North’s food security and crop situations from Feb. 10 to March 12 at Pyongyang’s official invitation.

In a phone interview with The Dong-A Ilbo, an official at a South Korean aid group said, “The U.S. has asked South Korean non-governmental organizations about North Korea’s crop and food supply situations in 2011 since the North’s artillery provocation on Yeonpyeong Island in November.”

Washington, however, remains officially cautious. U.S. State Department spokesman Philip Crowley told a news briefing Monday that the U.S. government has no immediate plans to provide humanitarian aid to the North.

ORIGINAL POST: According to the Donga Ilbo (1/31/2011) the US and DPRK are talking food aid once more:

The U.S. and North Korea have begun their third round of food diplomacy, with Washington considering resuming food aid to Pyongyang.

The U.S. has halted food aid to the North twice since its first provision in 1996 after blaming Pyongyang for diverting the aid.

The North has always asked for food aid first since North Korean leader Kim Jong Il confronted a series of crises in the early 1990s, when the former Soviet Union and China stopped economic assistance to the Stalinist country.

His father and the North`s founder Kim Il Sung died in 1994. When the North was devastated by floods and other natural disasters nationwide, Kim Jong Il ordered state cadres to beg the U.S. for help.

The North Korean Foreign Ministry then formed a committee for flood damage and went hat in hand to Washington. The Clinton administration provided 19,500 tons of food through the World Food Program in 1996, expecting the North to implement the 1994 Agreed Framework and be docile in talks for the repatriation of remains of American soldiers killed in action in the Korean War.

Washington increased its food aid from 177,000 tons in 1997 to 695,000 tons in 1999. In 2000, a joint communiqué between the North and the U.S. was signed.

North Korea, however, diverted the food aid in ignoring U.S. and international principles for humanitarian aid.

As public opinion in the U.S. worsened over the assistance, the George W. Bush administration slashed the aid volume from 350,000 tons in 2001 to 40,000 tons in 2003. The U.S. Congress demanded greater transparency in the distribution of the food aid in 2004, when it passed the North Korean Human Rights Act.

Rejecting the demand, Pyongyang expelled World Food Program staff in 2005. Washington opted not to provide food aid to Pyongyang in 2006.

Flexing its muscles in November 2006 by conducting its first nuclear test, North Korea again requested U.S. aid in 2008. The Bush administration, which was nearing the end of its term, chose to sit at the negotiating table with the North and offered 500,000 tons of food aid through the World Food Program.

The North received 169,000 tons of food by expanding the areas where food distribution is monitored and agreeing to allow more Korean-speaking monitoring personnel.

In early 2009, Pyongyang decided to test the newly inaugurated Obama administration by launching a long-range rocket and preparing for a second nuclear test. In March that year, the North expelled humanitarian aid groups, saying it would not be able to keep its promise of distribution transparency.

In fall last year, North Korea unveiled its uranium enrichment program and showed its centrifuges to the U.S. in a virtual threat to conduct its third nuclear test with uranium bombs if Washington failed to provide food.

What the U.S. will eventually do is attracting interest since South Korea is opposed to aid to the North.

Read the full stories below:
Pyongyang asks U.S. to restore food aid: source
JoongAng Daily
Kim Jung-wook, Moon Gwang-lip
2/9/2011

US, N. Korea begin 3rd round of food diplomacy
Donga Ilbo
1/31/2011

Radio Free Asia: US, NGOs discussing food aid to NK
Donga Ilbo
2/6/2011

According to Yonhap:

North Koreans are expected to live 11 years less than the average South Korean due mainly to malnutrition that adversely affects births and causes more people to die earlier than normal, a government report showed Monday.

The Statistics Korea report, based on data released by the United Nations and Pyongyang, showed the life expectancy for an average North Korean at 69 years, lower than numbers reached in the communist country in the early 1990s before it was hit by devastating famine.

The life expectancy for men reached 64.9 while that for women was 71.7 years. This is 11.3 years and 11.2 years less than this year’s life expectancy of South Korean men and women, respectively.

“Generally, the population has not fully recovered from the famine and hardship, although conditions have improved in the past few years,” a statistics official said.

He said estimates revealed that there may have been a “population loss” of around 610,000 for a decade after the mid-1990s, caused by a higher number of deaths and people shying away from having babies.

The official said up to 480,000 more people may have died compared to what was normal during the 1994-2005 “slow-motion famine” period when the country could not properly feed its people.

Newborn baby numbers fell by an estimated 130,000 vis-a-vis natural increase rates in the 1995-2004 time frame, as fewer people married and couples put off giving birth during hard times, he said.

The latest statistical report, however, said that despite chronic food shortages, North Korea’s population managed to post steady growth in the last two decades.

As of this year, the population is estimated to be 24.19 million, up 0.5 percent from a year earlier. Before 1997, the population grew more than 1 percent on-year, but gains have become stagnant since 1998, staying under the 1 percent mark.

This year’s numbers make North Korea the 49th most populous country in the world, compared with 26th-ranked South Korea, whose population reached 48.88 million.

The statistical report, meanwhile, showed the number of economically active people in the North between the ages of 15 and 64 reaching 16.58 million this year, with the number of men being smaller than women.

The median age of the population stood at 30.1 years for men and 33.7 for women, five or six years younger than numbers for South Korea. The country effectively became an “aging society” in 2003 with the number of people over 65 hitting 7.2 percent of the total population and should be an “aged society” in 2033 with 14.5 percent of the population over 65 years old.

The report predicted that North Korea’s population will peak at 26.54 million in 2037, compared to South Korea’s peak population that is expected to be reached in 2018, when there may be some 49.34 million people living in the country.

If both South and North Korean populations are combined, the number would hit its peak in 2027 with 75.06 million people living on the peninsula, the report said.

Read the full story here:
N. Koreans expected to live 11 years less than S. Koreans: report
Yonhap
11/22/2010

Acording to Reuters:

North Korea is facing a grain deficit of 542,000 tonnes in the 2010/11 marketing year after the government only partially provided for grain import cover, the United Nations’ food agencies said on Tuesday.

North Korea’s cereal import requirement in 2010/11 is estimated at 867,000 tonnes, while the government plans to import commercially only about 325,000 tonnes, the Food and Agriculture Organisation and the World Food Programme said .

“The mission recommended to provide some 305,000 tonnes of international food assistance to the most vulnerable population,” the FAO and WFP said in a report after a joint mission to the country.

According to the New York Times:

Despite a relatively good autumn harvest in North Korea, the reclusive communist nation remains in dire need of food aid, especially for its youngest children, pregnant women and the elderly, according to two United Nations agencies.

In a new joint report, the World Food Program and the Food and Agriculture Organization said that North Korea, even after substantial imports, would have a shortfall in staple crops — mostly rice, grains and soybeans — of more than half a million tons.

The 2010 harvest was 3 percent higher than last year, the agencies said, despite an unusually harsh winter and alternating drought and flood conditions over the summer.

But even in the best of years North Korea is unable to feed itself. Government food distribution provides only half the necessary daily calories, the report said. People are thus left to fend for themselves with small hillside plots, kitchen gardens and the buying of or bartering for food on the black market.

Aid officials have estimated that the food aid program for North Korea was 80 percent underfunded and that nearly half the country’s children are malnourished.

“I saw a lot of children already losing the battle against malnutrition,” said Josette Sheeran, executive director of the World Food Program, after a visit to North Korea earlier this month.

“Their bodies and minds are stunted, and so we really feel the need there,” she said. , Agriculture is “the main contributor to the national income” in the North, the agencies said, although its percentage of gross domestic product has declined in the past decade to 21 percent from 30 percent. A lack of foreign currency and credit, made worse by international sanctions against the regime, prevented significant imports of fertilizer and pesticides as well as tires and spare parts for farm trucks and tractors.

In remarks before the Group of 20 summit meeting in Seoul last week, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said he had “very serious concerns about the humanitarian situation” in North Korea, “especially for the very young children.”

Mr. Ban said the South Korean president, Lee Myung-bak, had pledged to him that the South would provide humanitarian assistance to the North’s children.

…

The two U.N. agencies said their report, which was released Tuesday, was produced by teams that went to most of North Korea’s principal agricultural regions.

As the teams traveled around, the report said, “it was evident that there were no cereals in stock in the warehouses visited.”

…

Additional Information:
1. Here is a link to stories about South Korean aid provided this year. 

2. The DPRK has recently expressed skepticism over the motivations of foreign aid agencies.

3. Here is a PDF of the UN Special Report.  It is full of data and has been added to my Economic Statistics Page.

4. Here is a link to the UN report which you can read on line.

Read the full sotries here:
N.Korea faces 542,000 t grain deficit in 2010/11-UN
Reuters
11/16/2010

U.N. Urges Food Aid for North Korea
New York Times
Mark McDonald and Kevin Drew
11/17/2010

According to the Associated Press:

The head of the World Food Programme said on Thursday she saw many children in North Korea who are “losing the battle against malnutrition” during a visit there.

Executive director Josette Sheeran made the remarks in Beijing on her return from a three-day trip to Pyongyang, the UN agency’s first top-level visit to the communist country in nearly a decade.

She said she visited an orphanage, a factory, and a hospital where children were being treated for malnutrition.

“I saw many children that are already losing the battle against malnutrition and their bodies and minds are stunted,” she said, adding that “the need there for special fortified food for the children is very strong”.

Sheeran said she was able to meet with Kim Yong Nam, the head of the country’s parliament, the foreign minister and agriculture department officials.

She was also able to visit the agency’s operations there. The World Food Programme has been providing food aid to North Korea since 1995. The UN agency says nearly a third of North Korea’s 24 million people are undernourished.

Sheeran said she has worries about the current funding for food aid to North Korea, which has relied on foreign assistance to feed its 23 million people since the mid-1990s.

Read the full story here:
WFP: N Korea children malnourished
AP
11/4/2010

According to the Korea Times:

The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported Wednesday that North Korea is the 11th largest recipient of its emergency funds in the world, and third in Asia.

Pyongyang received $13.4 million or 3.6 percent of the $372 million that the Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF) allocated from January through September.

CERF, established in 2006, is a U.N. fund created to aid regions threatened by starvation and natural disasters.

Pakistan, which suffered catastrophic floods in August, received 40 million, the largest allocation in CERF’s history, followed by Haiti, Niger and Congo.

Sri Lanka, which received $13.8 million, placed second among Asian recipient countries.

North Korea ranks 173 among 177 countries on the human development index, according to the Human Development Report 2007/2008, published by the U.N.

The U.N. estimates that five out of 1,000 children in the North die before they reach the age of five.

Experts say some 23 percent of North Korean children under five were malnourished between 2000 and 2007 and 32 percent of the population in the Stalinist regime was undernourished between 2003 and 2005.

Josette Sheeran, head of the World Food Program (WFP), claims that the U.N.’s flagship agency is falling short of funds to feed hungry people in the impoverished and reclusive nation.

The WFP received $106.2 million, the largest amount among aid agencies, from CERF in 2010, followed by UNICEF, which received 86.1 million.

The WFP claims that it can only help a quarter of the 2.5 million North Korean children suffering from malnourishment due to a shortage of funds.

The WFP helps feed some 670,000 people, mainly children in the communist North.

Read the full story here:
NK is 11th largest receiver of UN CERF cash
Korea Times
Lee Tae-hoon
11/3/2010

According to the AP:

Ban Ki-moon told U.N. member nations in a report on North Korea’s human rights situation that rainfall in some areas of the country is expected to be 18 percent lower this year than in 2009, despite torrential downpours and flooding that hit the country’s west on Aug. 20.

U.N. agencies providing humanitarian assistance in the country are also increasingly faced with critical funding shortages, and have managed to provide only 20 percent of the $492 million required in 2009, he said. “This has led to a downsizing of operations, with several areas and some vulnerable groups no longer receiving international assistance,” Ban’s report said.

The Secretary-General wrote that reports from inside the country indicate that North Koreans continue to suffer from chronic food security, high malnutrition and severe economic problems.

e also urged nations to “encourage improvements in the human rights situation” inside North Korea.

The Secretary-General said the North Korean government also had the responsibility “to take immediate steps to ensure the enjoyment of the right to food, water, sanitation and health, and to allocate greater budgetary resources to that end.”

“Such persistent problems as widespread food shortages, a health care system in decline, lack of access to safe drinking water and deterioration in the quality of education are seriously hampering the fulfillment of basic human rights,” Ban wrote.

Ban said broad restrictions on civil and political rights, such as freedom of thought, religion, and expression continue to be imposed by the North Korean government on its citizens. “The government’s control over the flow of information is strict and pervasive,” his report said.

North Koreans found listening to broadcasts or disseminating information seen as opposing the government can be sentenced to up to two years in a “labor training camp,” or up to five years of “corrective labor” for more serious cases, it said.

The report said that although independent verification is impossible, there continue to be reports of public executions, political prisoners held under harsh conditions, and the use of torture, forced labor, and ill treatment of refugees or asylum-seekers repatriated from abroad.

Ban said that North Korea has rejected offers of technical assistance by the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, and he urged the government to reconsider its position.

While serious concerns remain about political and civil rights in the insular nation, “I urge the international community not to constrain humanitarian aid on the basis of political and security concerns,” Ban wrote.

Read the full story here:
UN: Less rain, aid to hurt North Koreans
Associated Press
Anita Snow
10/29/2010

Pictured Above: Love North Korean Children Bakery (Sonbong, DPRK)

Michael Rank writes in the Asia Times:

North Korea is a land of hunger and poverty but the children of Hahyeon primary school look reassuringly healthy, thanks to a small, British-based charity that runs three bakeries in this isolated and highly secretive country.

The children receive their midday meals courtesy of Love North Korean Children, [1] which bakes 2,500 mandu or steamed buns each day for pupils in 20 schools in and around the northeastern coastal city of Sonbong, near the Chinese border.

“If we did not provide these buns the children would go hungry,” said the charity’s founder and powerhouse, South Korean-born George Rhee.

Rhee works indefatigably to make sure that his bakeries have sufficient supplies of flour and other essential items, all of which have to be imported from China, something of a logistical and bureaucratic nightmare.

“All of our food gets to the children. None goes to the North Korean army or government,” said Rhee, and as he travels to North Korea from London up to 10 times a year, he is in a position to know.

Rhee, 52, told how he was inspired to found Love North Korean Children as a result of his own childhood experiences. He was one of eight children – he has six brothers and a sister – and when his father’s land reclamation business went bust, it left the family penniless. His parents were forced to put him and his twin brother in a children’s home.

The home was a cruel place and the children often went hungry, and it was this experience that made Rhee decide that he wanted to help the children of North Korea.

“At first I was thinking of opening an orphanage, but the government wouldn’t allow that. They say North Korean leader Kim Jong-il is our father, so there is no need for orphanages. So then I decided to open a bakery,” Rhee recalled.

Rhee first visited North Korea in 2002, and opened the charity’s first bakery the following year, in Rajin, close to Sonbong. I visited him there last month. He recently handed over responsibility for the Rajin bakery to a Korean-American group, but he also runs a bakery in Pyongyang, and this year opened a new bakery In Hyangsan, about 150 kilometers north of the capital.

He puts the cost of flour and equipment for the Sonbong and Pyongyang bakeries at about US$6,300 each per month, and for the Hyangsan bakery at almost double that, as it feeds twice as many children.

Rhee is a minister in the Assemblies of God Church and has its backing for his charity. Most of the costs are borne by three Dutch Christian foundations, the Barnabas Fund, Stichting Ora and Dorcas Aid International, but Rhee hopes to build more bakeries in North Korea and recently went on a fundraising trip to South Korea to talk to local companies and churches.

“There is a lot of interest in what we are doing. I am hopeful that we will be able to raise more money to open more bakeries,” he said.

Rhee said he hopes to open a fourth bakery in Haeju, the hometown of his late father, who escaped by boat to South Korea at the height of the Korean War in 1951.

“The North Korean government says we can. The only question is money,” he added.

Although the children at the Sonbong school looked healthy and well fed, they are among the lucky ones. Rhee said some of the children whom his bakeries feed are thin and pale, even with the extra food they receive from Love North Korean Children.

“I have even seen dead children in the streets. The situation for children in North Korea is terrible,” he stressed.

The United Nations World Food Program (WFP) bears this out. It says 33% of the population is undernourished and 23% of children under five are under-weight for their age.

“Public rations are reportedly far from sufficient and daily food consumption for most households is poor”, the WFP reports. Many people are forced to survive by cutting down on the number of meals per day, eating more wild foods – grass and bark in some cases – and less maize and rice, and reducing portion sizes for adults so that children can eat.

Although conditions have improved since the mid-1990s, when hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of people died in a terrible famine, North Korea remains one of the world’s poorest countries.

Aid workers and diplomats say the government bears much of the blame, with an inflexible, highly centralized food-distribution system that results in a large proportion of the population going permanently hungry.

The WFP tactfully avoids blaming the government, referring to “a lack of arable land, poor soil management, insufficient water reservoirs to combat drought, shortages of fuel and fertilizer, outdated economic, transport and information infrastructure, and a general vulnerability to natural disasters”.

It quotes the Food and Agriculture Organization as saying North Korea needs to import 25% of its grain requirements, “but economic constraints mean the DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea] will struggle to meet its food import needs.”

All this means that small organizations like Rhee’s do a valuable job in feeding people who would otherwise go hungry, although the paranoid, xenophobic nature of the regime makes their work extremely challenging.

Until recently, a number of South Korean charities were active in North Korea, but the Seoul government ordered them out after the sinking of the naval ship the Cheonan in March in which 46 South Korean sailors died.

The South Korean government blamed North Korea for the sinking, and relations between the two countries, cool at best, went into the deep freeze.

Surprisingly perhaps, Rhee strongly supports the Seoul administration’s tough line, as he believes most of the South Korean charities were naive and were unable, or unwilling, to prevent the North Korean government from diverting much of the food they provided to the million-strong army.

“I support President Lee Myung-bak in this,” Rhee said. “These South Korean organizations were foolish” in not monitoring where food and other supplies were going.

Love North Korean Children was not affected by the ban, however, as it is a British-registered charity and Rhee, who has lived in the UK for 20 years, is a British citizen.

“The North Koreans cooperate well with us. It isn’t easy but we help to make sure that people get fed,” he said.

I had unexpected proof that the North Koreans appreciate Rhee’s efforts. During my visit to North Korea, officials constantly complained to me about photographs I was taking and at one point deleted some pictures on my camera.

I was concerned that they would delete more photographs when I left the country, as frequently happens.

I need not have worried, however. The customs officer who checked my camera at the North Korean-Chinese border was well disposed towards us, as his children were fed by Love North Korean Children. He took just a quick look at my photographs and waved us through.

You can see the author’s photos from Rason here.

Read the full story here:
British bakeries a lifeline in North Korea
Asia Times
Michael Rank
10/27/2010

According to the APF:

North Korea is heading for a “chronic” new food crisis with drought and floods in different parts of the country exacerbated by cuts in international aid, the United Nations said.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon expressed concern “that the acute humanitarian needs” of at least 3.5 million women and children in North Korea would worsen because of food shortages.

Even though North Korea is considered by many to be the world’s most isolated state, Ban said in a report to be discussed Friday that “the global economic crisis is further increasing the levels of hardship” adding to the “chronic food insecurity”.

South Korea on Friday said it had no immediate plan to resume large-scale food aid to North Korea despite the UN warning on the food crisis.

“The government stance is that in order for the massive government food aid to be resumed, overall inter-Korean relations must be taken into account,” Unification Ministry spokeswoman Lee Jong-Joo told AFP.

She stressed, however, that Seoul allows smaller-scale “humanitarian aid” to the North, including 5,000 tonnes of rice and other aid supplies currently being shipped victims of floods that devastated northwestern North Korea in August.

…

There has been a shortage of rainfall in some parts of the country but in August torrential downpours caused floods in the north, near the Chinese border.

The UN predicted that the cereal yield would be nearly a fifth lower than in 2009.

It said the country needs 3.5 million tons of cereals a year to feed its population and would have to import 1.1 million tons. In addition, UN agencies had raised only 20 percent of the 492 million dollars they estimated in 2009 would be needed for the North.

Ban quoted the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) as saying that each year, some 40,000 children under five become “acutely malnourished” in North Korea, with 25,000 needing hospital treatment.

“The lack of maintenance of water and sanitation systems increases rates of diarrhoea and acute respiratory infections, which are leading causes of child death.

“In addition, one third of women of childbearing age suffer from anaemia, a nutrition deficiency that is also a major cause of maternal mortality.”

The poor diet across the country leads to widespread “infectious diseases, physical and mental development disorders, poor labour productivity and an increased risk of premature death,” said the grim report.

A survey carried out by the government with UN support showed that about one third of the population suffer from stunting — below normal body growth. In some regions the figure was 45 percent.

The report was intended to be on human rights in North Korea and the UN chief said there was an “urgent need” for Kim Jong-Il’s regime to take steps to provide the basic right to food, water, sanitation and health.

The UN reported little change in the “comprehensive restrictions” on freedom of speech, religion and opinion in the tightly policed state. “The government’s control over the flow of information is strict and pervasive.”

Ban highlighted the difficulty in getting reliable information on events in the North.

But he said: “There are a number of reports concerning public executions, the use of torture, forced labour and the ill-treatment of refugees or asylum-seekers repatriated from abroad.”

His report said North Korea’s UN delegation had acknowledged that public executions were carried out for “very brutal violent crimes.”

It added that the UN envoy on rights in North Korea had raised concerns with the North’s mission about conditions in six prisons and detention centers reportedly used for political prisoners.

With the North embroiled in a dispute with South Korea over the sinking of a warship and in a nuclear arms standoff with the international community, Ban said humanitarian aid should not be restricted “on the basis of political and security concerns.”

Though unrelated to the UN findings, South Korea is shipping 5,000 tons of rice to the DPRK today. According to Yonhap:

The Red Cross aid, which is aimed at helping the North cope with the aftermath of floods, marks South Korea’s first government-funded provision of rice to the North since President Lee Myung-bak took office in early 2008 on a pledge to link aid to progress in efforts to end Pyongyang’s nuclear programs.

Seoul also plans to send a shipment of 10,000 tons of cement to the North later this week.

A total of 13.9 billion won (US$12.3 million) came from the government coffers to finance the flood aid.

Also Monday, three Red Cross officials prepared to fly to the Chinese city to receive the rice and instant noodles there and transport the relief supplies by truck to the flood-hit North Korean border city of Sinuiju, according to officials from the Red Cross and the Unification Ministry.

The cargo ships are expected to arrive in Dandong around Wednesday.

Rice will be delivered in five-kilogram packages, and each package is marked with “Donation from the Republic of Korea,” South Korea’s official name.

In August, South Korea first offered to provide relief aid to the North after devastating floods hit the communist nation. North Korea later asked for rice, heavy construction equipment and materials.

Stories about South Korean aid in 2010 can be found here.

China has also pledged food assistance. According to KBS:

A Japanese daily says China pledged 500-thousand tons of rice aid to North Korea during Kim Jong-il’s visit to China in August.

The New York Times raises the concern that food aid may be diverted.  According to the article:

Rice, a staple of the diets in both Koreas, is also a highly symbolic item in terms of food aid throughout Asia. The 5,000 tons of rice in the shipment on Monday can feed about 325,000 people for a month, according to Red Cross estimates.

Some analysts and aid workers expressed concern that the rice would likely be diverted to political elites, loyal party members and the military rather than delivered to the neediest in the North. That has been the pattern, they said, of previous government aid deliveries.

“I’m not unhappy about food going up, but I fear that this kind of government-to-government distribution to Pyongyang will be carried out along loyalty lines,” said Tim Peters, founder of the civic group Helping Hands Korea. “Distribution through small NGOs that are more strategically placed and can get the food into the interior and places like remote mining towns, that is the more intelligent strategy.”

Mr. Peters said his group, which primarily assists North Korean refugees, has received numerous reports from defectors from what he called “the Siberia of North Korea” that residents in the hinterlands “never see any of this kind of food aid.”

Five weeks ago, a truck convoy delivered 203 tons of rice to North Korea, the first rice donations of any kind from the South in nearly three years. That nongovernmental assistance, which was donated by charity groups and opposition political parties, came one day after a shipment of 530 tons of flour was sent by a South Korean provincial government and civic groups.

According to Fox News:

In an eerie replay of a scandal that enveloped the United Nations Development Program, an internal audit by the U.N.’s World Food Program shows significant “lapses,” “anomalies,” and unexplained variations last year in the way the relief agency reported its financial and commodity management in North Korea.

The holes in WFP’s humanitarian reporting raise questions of whether a U.N. agency has allowed money and supplies intended for starving North Koreans to end up in the hands of the country’s brutal communist rulers, who are under international sanctions aimed at halting their aggressive atomic weapons program.

According to WFP itself, in response to questions from Fox News, the confidential audit “highlighted a small number of inconsistencies in commodity accounting that have subsequently been addressed.” All the issues involved have since been “closed,” the agency added.

However, Fox News obtained a copy of a summary of projects undertaken by WFP’s internal watchdog Office of Internal Audit between July and September of last year, which lists the North Korean lapses first among its audit highlights. Among other things, it notes:

–“inconsistent data and unreliable information systems used for reporting [WFP] commodity movements, stock balances and food utilization” in North Korea;

–“lapses…in financial and commodity management processes.”

—“numerous anomalies…in information systems used for reporting commodity movements and food utilization in the CO [WFP local country office].”

See summary document here (PDF).

The full extent of the management lapses and their consequences cannot be determined without the unexpurgated audit report—and the WFP is not willing to make that public. The agency flatly turned down a request by Fox News for the document.

In fact, WFP has not even supplied a copy of the audit report to nations, including the U.S., that supervise its operations through a 36-member executive board. (The U.S. government gave about $1.76 billion to WFP in 2009, and has so far contributed $959 million this year.)

A Fox News query to the U.S. Mission to the U.N. in Geneva got confirmation that the U.S. government did not have the report, and that “WFP does not currently share its internal audit reports with the WFP Executive Board members.”

By now, however, it was supposed to. A policy that allowed the WFP’s executive director, Josette Sheeran, to give such audit reports to executive board members on demand was up for approval by the board at its last meeting in June. However, it was withdrawn from the board’s agenda; it is now up for consideration at the next Board meeting in November.

Even then, however, the wording of a draft version of the decision underlines that the sunlight provisions “will not be applied retroactively.”

The audit references to lapses in relief aid reporting practices are not the first indicator that the regime of ailing dictator Kim Jong Il might have the opportunity to exploit WFP resources in North Korea.

In June 2009, Fox News got an admission from the relief agency that its food supplies were carried from China to North Korea on vessels owned by the Kim regime. The potential transportation costs for those relief supplies appeared to be enormously high to outside shipping experts asked by Fox News to analyze the agency’s relief program documents. No mention of the regime’s role in transporting WFP goods appeared in the documents or on the agency’s website.

Click here to read an earlier Fox News article on this topic.

WFP has delivered more than $1 billion worth of food aid to North Korea since 2000, but the amount of donated money available for that effort has dwindled sharply as the Kim regime has exploded two nuclear bombs, threatened neighboring Japan and South Korea with war, and even sunk a South Korean warship on the high seas, according to the best forensic evidence available.

Its current plans call for spending about $91 million for food for about 2.2 million North Koreans this year.

The WFP audit reference to lapsed internal controls in North Korea, and the agency’s pooh-poohing of them, also bears a disturbing resemblance to the early stages of a battle over the role of the United Nations Development Program in North Korea, which led to the closure of UNDP’s North Korea office for two years, from 2007 to 2009. The WFP was later named as the U.N.’s lead agency in the country.

In 2006, a whistleblower named Artjon Shkurtaj revealed that UNDP procedures in North Korea had funneled millions of dollars in hard currency to the Kim regime, allowed North Korean government nominees to occupy sensitive UNDP positions in the local country office, kept thousands of U.S. dollars counterfeited by North Korea without informing U.S. authorities, and other transgressions.

All were flatly denied by the U.N. agency, though many of the accusations were later revealed to have been mentioned in internal audit reports — which UNDP refused to make public, on the same grounds currently used by WFP, that they were internal management tools. The existence of the audit criticisms were only made known through an external board of auditors’ investigation in 2007.

A further outside investigation revealed that UNDP’s transgressions were even worse than the auditors had suggested. Not only had UNDP routinely continued to hand over millions in hard currency to the Kim regime, use government nominated officials in sensitive positions, and transfer sensitive equipment with potential for terrorist use or for use in creating weapons of mass destruction, it had done so in violation of U.N. Security Council sanctions in force at the time, and also contravened its own basic financial rules and regulations.

Click here to read an earlier Fox News article on this topic.

In the midst of the furor over its North Korean activities, UNDP finally agreed to make future internal audit reports public—at least to governments on its executive board, and as long as they applied in writing. Since then, it has also amended its internal procedures and is now relaunching itself in North Korea. (To date, the U.N. has not paid recompense to Shkurtaj that was mandated by its own ethics officer in the wake of the UNDP scandal.)

Is the World Food Program following the unsettling trail blazed by UNDP in North Korea, before it mended its ways?

Without the full internal audits, it is hard to tell—but the stonewalling of those audits looks very familiar.

Read the full story here:
U.N. Audit Finds ‘Lapses’ in Managing Food Program Aid to N. Korea
Fox News
George Russell
9/28/2010

According toYonhap:

The World Food Program is struggling to keep its project of feeding malnourished children in North Korea from shrinking, its director for the communist state said in an interview on Thursday.

Torben Due, who represents the WFP office in Pyongyang, said his organization set out to raise US$500 million two years ago to provide basic nutrition for North Korean children.

In reality, what the WFP ended up with was $100 million. Due said his team in Pyongyang has re-designed its operation for the next two years to value at $96 million because of grim expectations for funding.

“The most difficult obstacle is that we don’t get the resources we need. We don’t get the money we need,” said Due, who was in Seoul this week to meet with government officials to discuss food needs in North Korea.

“We had to reduce (our program) because we could see we would not get the money. We had to design a program small and realistic in terms of what we would be able to do,” he said.

The WFP is a U.N. organization heavily dependent on donation. In North Korea, it supplies cereal-type food mixed with soybeans, milk powder, sugar and others rich in protein and minerals, specifically aimed to fight nutritional deficiencies in growing children.

“The child who is chronically malnourished will be damaged in a way that lasts a whole life. He will be physically stunted, and mental and intellectual development will also be harmed,” Due said, adding North Korean children “particularly” like biscuits.

Due said political tensions appear to be one reason why the WFP operation is not receiving enough donations for North Korea, which has conducted two nuclear tests since 2006, defying warnings.

“This is a pure humanitarian issue. Children suffer more than anybody else if there is no food,” he said, adding that the WFP office in Pyongyang had to cut the number of counties it was supporting from 130 to 65 this year.

“You are talking about roughly a third of the population that has problems with insufficient food intake, both in terms of quantity and quality. What we’re providing is supplement for a small part of the population. The problem is much bigger than what the WFP program is about,” he said.

North Korea has a population of about 24 million. Due said quantity matters as much as quality when it comes to helping North Korean children.

“If you have a country with 5 million children, if you want to contribute and solve the problem, you must think in terms of what is needed,” he said.

Due declined to disclose his discussions with the South Korean government officials he met here. South Korea has suspended sending large-scale food aid to North Korea unless Pyongyang moves to denuclearize under a multinational agreement.

North Korea has relied on international handouts since it suffered massive famine in the 1990s, when as many as 2 million people reportedly died.

The country is vulnerable to natural disasters. Earlier this month, heavy rains along its border with China raised the level of rivers and led to the evacuation of 23,000 North Koreans, Due said.

“In the areas affected, it’s quite devastating,” he said. But Due said North Korea had yet to appeal for international assistance as “the impact is very limited” and “localized.”

“The government can probably handle it themselves. We are, along with the Red Cross, providing some items,” including 1,300 tons of food, he said, adding he had no knowledge of human losses yet.

Earlier Thursday, South Korea’s Red Cross proposed sending aid to North Korea to help it recover from the flooding.

Read the full story here:
WFP feeding fewer N. Korean children as donation shrinks: director
Yonhap
Sam Kim
8/26/2010