The team from the US State Department in their four-day visit to Pyongyang has reached a conditional agreement to supply 500,000 tonnes as food aid. Simultaneously, the deal would also facilitate monitors to have unlimited access to oversee the food distribution process, to ensure it reaches to the poor and the needy. The UN’s World Food Program (WFP) stipulates in its August 31 2007 declaration that there should be complete transparency in food distribution system.
The Stalinist state will receive 400,000 tonnes from the US through WFP and an additional 100,000 tonnes will be made available from the US non-governmental organizations. According to the officials, the US President George Bush is expected to ratify the deal soon and the first shipment of 50,000 tonnes is likely to arrive at North Korea by early June. The new deal will allow random inspections that were never observed in any previous food aid programs in the iron-curtained N. Korea.
North Korea since its 1990 famine largely relied on aid from China, South Korea and the UN to feed its 23 million people. Rising global food prices, China’s domestic food needs and Seoul’s new leadership’s demand of linking economic assistance with de-nuclearization have created a cumulative effect on the North Korea’s food bank. South Korea in recent years had provided its neighbor with about 400,000 tonnes of rice and 300,000 tonnes of fertilizers, annually as bilateral aid. North Korea’s devastating flood of last year has been perceived as the chief cause for the present food crisis. People still have a vivid memory of the famine that took the lives of about 1 million people.
The food aid comes close on heels with the US’ separate negotiations with Pyongyang on de-nuclearization. Analysts believe that the food aid is a quid pro quo effect of the communist Korea’s willingness to deactivate their nuclear plants as part of the six-nation de-nuclearization deal.