12th May, 2006

North Korea is set to once again accept international food aid following an agreement with the United Nations’ World Food Programme.

The UN agency will conduct a two-year operation aimed at providing support for 1.9 million people, most of them women and children. The operation, which will involve the provision of 150,000 tonnes of commodities to North Koreans, aims to combat nutritional deficiencies and boost food security "at a grassroots level".

The move comes after the North Korean Government declared last year in August last year that it would no longer accept emergency food aid, saying there had been better harvests and citing concerns about creating a culture of dependency and the intrusiveness of monitoring.

The World Food Programme had been providing emergency food aid to North Korea for 10 years prior to last year’s decision and had been supporting up to as many as a third of the 23 million people in the country before operations were stopped.

The latest UN data - which comes from a survey conducted in October 2004 - shows that 37 per cent of young children were chronically malnourished and a third of mothers were both malnourished and anaemic.

- DAVID ADAMS