U.N. agencies to assess N. Korea's harvests for first time in 4 years: report

SEOUL, Oct. 3 (Yonhap) -- The U.N.'s food agencies plan to send their experts to North Korea for the first time in four years to examine fall harvests and estimate needs for external assistance, a report said Friday.

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Food Program (WFP) have
made joint yearly assessments of crops and food supplies in North Korea since
1995, but activity was suspended in 2004 as Pyongyang demanded international
non-governmental organizations scale down their operations.
The U.N. agencies will resume their work as early as next week when a joint group
of six agricultural experts from the two agencies will fly to North Korea with
the North's government approval, an FAO coordinator told Radio Free Asia, a
Washington-based station.
"So obviously, we are going to spend quite a bit of time in the western provinces
-- south and north Hwanghae provinces and south and north Pyongan provinces --
all of those will definitely be included because obviously they are the
agricultural areas," the coordinator was quoted as saying.
He predicted North Korea would have better harvests this year due to improved
weather conditions and the abscence of major natural disasters like flooding. The
FAO expects the assessment report to come out by the end of November.
Since the late 1990s, when an estimated one to three million North Koreans are
believed to have starved to death due to famine, the North has prioritized its
agricultural sector while accepting foreign aid to help feed its populations of
23 million people.
Last month, the U.N. World Food Program appealed to international donors to
provide an additional US$60 million in emergency aid to North Korea, saying the
reclusive state could slip back into famine without additional aid worth about
$500 million over the next 15 months.
hkim@yna.co.kr
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