Brussels, 04/07/2011 (Agence Europe) - To stave off the growing threat of a major humanitarian crisis in North Korea, the European Commission is to make €10 million worth of emergency food aid to help some 650,000 people, including numbers of children already suffering from malnutrition.
This emergency aid, funded by ECHO, the Commission's humanitarian aid wing, will go mainly to the most at risk in the Northern and Eastern provinces of the country and will help see them through to the next cereal harvest, due in October. It will target children under five who have already been hospitalised with severe acute malnutrition, children in residential care, pregnant and breastfeeding women, hospital patients and the elderly.
International Cooperation, Humanitarian Aid and Crisis Response Commissioner Kristalina Georgieva said: “The purpose of this aid package is to save the lives of at least 650,000 people who could otherwise die from lack of food”. She went on: “Our experts saw severely malnourished children in hospitals and nurseries where no treatment was available. Clearly, North Korea's chronic nutrition problem is turning into an acute crisis in some parts of the country. But because of well-founded concerns I have insisted that a strict monitoring operation is pursued from the point of delivery of the food aid at the ports all the way to the neediest recipients.”
It was a visit to hospitals and clinics, kindergartens and nurseries, markets and cooperative farms and state food distribution centres in June by Commission experts that provided the opportunity to assess needs and confirm that the nutrition situation is worse than in previous years. The EU team found that state-distributed food rations, upon which two thirds of the North Korean population depend, had been severely cut from 400g of cereals per person per day in early April to 150g in June: less than 400kCal - a fifth of the daily average nutritional requirement and equivalent to a small bowl of rice.
As the food assistance will have to be channelled through a highly centralised distribution system managed by the authorities, strict safeguards and controls have been agreed with the World Food Programme (WFP), ECHO's partner on the ground. In order to mitigate the risks of food diversion, WFP will manage and oversee the delivery of the EU aid package with rigorous checks at every stage: it will pay 400 visits per month to warehouses, child institutions, households, hospitals, markets and food distribution sites. (A.N./transl.rt)