Pyonyang: North Korea can expect no respite from harvest shortfalls that have left a third of its children under five malnourished, the top U.N. humanitarian official said on Friday after visiting the isolated state and urging officials to open up so aid can flow.
Speaking at the end of a five-day visit to North Korea, Valerie Amos, a U.N. undersecretary-general, said millions of North Koreans, particularly children, mothers and pregnant women, need help. The millions of hungry, she said, is borne out by UN data and by what she learned from visits to farms, hospitals and orphanages, as well as from officials.
Rising global commodities prices coupled with summer floods and typhoons have compounded the emergency this year, and the United Nations estimated in March that more than 6 million North Koreans urgently needed food aid.
But North Korea’s requests for aid have gone mostly unanswered by an international community which suspects official hoarding. The current World Food Programme appeal for the country is only about 30 percent funded.
“The assessment seems to indicate that this year’s harvest will be about the same or slightly better than last year. The point is that that’s not enough,” Valerie Amos, the U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, told reporters in Beijing after arriving from Pyongyang.
“The average annual food gap is around one million tonnes out of a total food requirement of 5.3 million tonnes,” she said. “Recent figures for children under five years of age show chronic malnutrition levels, i.e. stunting, at 33 percent nationwide and 45 percent in the north of the country.”
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