S. Korean groups urge immediate food shipments to N. Korea
SKOREA: Influential South Korean religious and civic group leaders
urged their government Monday to send at least 200,000 tons of badly
needed food aid immediately to North Korea.
The 33 organisation heads say hundreds of thousands of North Koreans
face starvation this year due to a serious food shortage in the isolated
communist state.
Some foreign analysts believe the North is approaching another
famine, a decade after up to one million people died of starvation.
Washington last month promised food aid shipments totalling 500,000
tonnes.
South Korea in recent years has provided its neighbour with about
400,000 tonnes of rice and 300,000 tonnes of fertiliser annually. There
has been no request for such shipments this year.
The North has cut ties with President Lee Myung-Bak’s conservative
government in protest at its firmer line linking aid to progress on
denuclearisation.
“We should save starving people regardless of who they are. That’s
the spirit of humanitarianism,” the leaders including Park Gyeong-Jo, an
archbishop of the Anglican Church of Korea, said in a joint statement.
They said North Korea faces a shortage of 600,000 tons in June and
July, urging Lee’s government to ship 200,000 tons even without being
asked by Pyongyang.
The 200,000 tons are the bare minimum with which North Koreans can
survive before the first shipment of US food aid arrives, they said.
“The South Korean government is not well aware of the reality of
North Korea,” Park told Yonhap news agency.
Good Friends, a Seoul-based humanitarian group which operates in the
communist North, has said that Pyongyang would never appeal to South
Korea for food aid even at the risk of starvation.
Since the 1990s famine, North Korea has depended on foreign aid to
help feed its 23 million people.
Floods last summer blamed partly on deforestation wiped out a
significant portion of the harvest and the North has also been hard hit
by the global rise in food prices.
Seoul, Monday, AFP |
