BEIJING — North Korea, which has suffered a series of natural disasters, will need even more international food aid in 2001 because of drought, failing infrastructure and a weak economy, U.N. aid officials said on Wednesday.
The country's seventh year of food shortages will require U.N. agencies, including the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and World Food Programme (WFP), to increase the amount of aid they were to appeal for later on Wednesday.
The 2001 aid appeal for North Korea, to be made by WFP executive director Catherine Bertini in Stockholm at 2 p.m. (1300 GMT), would surpass the $106 million requested for 2000, U.N. official Oliver Lacey-Hall told a Beijing news conference.
"The food security outlook for 2001 is actually worse than for this year," said Pyongyang-based Lacey-Hall of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
He said a joint FAO-WFP mission to North Korea last month reported North Korea's rice crop was 31 percent lower in 2000 and maize output had fallen 235,000 tonnes from last year.
North Korea would need to import 1.87 million tonnes of cereal between November 2000 and October 2001 to cover the gap between what it has and what it needs to feed its 22 million people, U.N. officials said.
A GREAT DISASTER
U.N. officials said drought at planting time this year and crop devastation from typhoons in August and September could bring famine back to vulnerable parts of the country.
A U.S. congressman, returning from a three-day visit to rural areas of North Korea, said on Wednesday the situation was far worse than what most people believed.
"... I think when somebody writes this history, when we really know what happened in North Korea, this will be one of the great disasters in the last 50 years. I think it's that severe in this country," said U.S. Representative Tony Hall, D-Ohio, told reporters in Seoul.
Hall, returning from his sixth visit to the North, believed famine conditions were worsening despite international food aid.
Dilawar Ali Khan, UNICEF representative for North Korea said that while food aid was critically important, donors also needed to boost support of other U.N. programmes.
He cited data for 2000 which showed that while donors covered 9.5 percent of the funds the WFP requested, the FAO and the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) received only 5.7 percent of what they had sought.
Khan said North Korea suffered crises in "food plus health plus water and environmental sanitation" with troubles in each area exacerbating those in the others.
"Until and unless we address these three issues in combination, the nutritional problems that the country is facing will not be addressed at the pace it needs to be," he said.
North Korea's severe electricity and fuel shortages had drastically reduced the ability of irrigation systems to cope with drought and lack of power reduced access to clean drinking water.
Khan said there was increasing hope that North Korea, which relies on international charities to help feed its people, could build upon its recent diplomatic breakthroughs with Western countries to forge trade ties to rescue its economy.
"Agricultural recovery is important, but economic recovery is essential," he said.