Beijing, July 01: The United Nations on Wednesday warned that North Korea faces another growing food crisis, with signs of increasing malnutrition among children.
The UN World Food Programme (WFP) can currently distribute food to about 2 million of its targeted 6.2 million North Koreans, said Torben Due, the agency’s country representative in North Korea.
“It’s a very difficult situation for many people in North Korea,” Due told reporters in Beijing.
The immediate lack of food is worsened by chronic malnutrition among North Korea’s 23 million people over the last 15 to 20 years, he said.
“We can see the impact of this under-nourishment in the children,” Due said.
Due said that while the future direction of the crisis remains “difficult to predict,” the WFP has heard reports of increasing hospital referrals for children with severe malnutrition.
People living in some of the worst-hit areas are forced to look for alternative food sources, he said.
“They rely on wild foods,” Due said. “And the quality of what they’re eating is becoming poorer and poorer.”
A lack of international donations has forced the WFP to scale down its operations from 131 counties to 57 in North Korea.
The agency is operating at less than 15 per cent of capacity and only provided food for 1.7 million of the neediest people in May.
The WFP appealed for 500 million dollars for its North Korea programme last year.
But with the government continuing its missile and nuclear weapons programmes in defiance of the international community, donor nations have not heeded the UN’s calls to ignore political issues and proceed from a “purely humanitarian perspective.”
Pyongyang’s ruling Korean Workers’ Party has also placed more restrictions on the WFP’s activities in North Korea, for example, objecting to the employment of Korean-speaking international staff.
“It’s very important that we focus on the innocent victims of these circumstances, and that is the children,” Due said.
WFP’s long-term support has helped to lessen the effects of a famine that was estimated to have killed more than 1 million people in the 1990s.
But despite the provision of more than 4 million tons of food valued at 1.7 billion dollars over 10 years, many North Koreans still struggle to feed themselves on a diet deficient in protein, fats and micronutrients, the WFP said.
—–Agencies