South Korea: There's no North Korea food crisis

[October 24, 2008]  SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- A South Korean official has disputed the U.N.'s assessment that millions of North Koreans are at risk of food shortages, saying Friday that the impoverished communist country does not appear to face a "serious" food emergency.

Unification Ministry spokesman Kim Ho-nyeon said that North Korea's harvest this year is not bad, citing South Korean civic officials who recently visited the country.

"We believe that the North's food condition is not in a serious crisis situation," Kim told reporters, adding that the weather has been good and there were no heavy rains like the ones that devastated the North last year.

His comments came a day after the U.N. food agency said millions of North Koreans face a food crisis and called on donor countries, including South Korea, to provide urgent food aid.

"Some areas of the northeastern provinces in the country ... have become extremely vulnerable, facing a situation of a humanitarian emergency," Jean-Pierre de Margerie, the WFP's country director for North Korea, said Thursday at a forum.

Around 2.7 million people on North Korea's west coast will run out of food in October, the WFP said in a report released Tuesday.

Food shortages have forced many North Koreans to go to hills to collect wild food to complement their daily rations and reduce the number of meals per day to two, de Margerie said.

He said his agency hasn't seen any evidence of starvation but said, "We have reached (a) very critical level and we shouldn't wait for another starvation before ringing the alarm bells."

Famine is believed to have killed as many as 2 million North Koreans in the mid and late-1990s when natural disasters and mismanagement devastated its centrally controlled economy. The North has since relied on aid to help feed its 23 million people.

In August, the WFP asked South Korea to provide emergency aid to North Korea to help it avert a food crisis, but Seoul has not yet responded.

The South Korean government said it would not tie food aid to North Korea's nuclear disarmament, but it also said public opinion was a consideration in deciding whether to send aid.

De Margerie was to meet South Korean officials on Friday and renew his agency's appeal for the North.

"Donor countries should back us up ... Now is (the) time to act," de Margerie said Thursday.

South Korea has been a major aid donor to its impoverished northern neighbor, but public sentiment has worsened following the July shooting death of a South Korean tourist at a North Korean mountain resort.

North Korea's reclusive regime had previously rejected South Korean offers of direct food aid in apparent anger over the new South Korean government's harder-line policy toward the North.

On Thursday in New York, a U.N. investigator on human rights said North Korea is using public executions to intimidate its citizens and has imposed restrictions on long distance calls to block the spread of news about rising food shortages.

Vitit Muntarbhorn told the U.N. General Assembly's human rights committee that North Korea has also imposed more severe sanctions on people seeking to leave the country and those forcibly returned, and still detains "very large numbers" of people in prison camps.

[Associated Press; By KWANG-TAE KIM]

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.