Food aid
July 26, 2011
South Korean trucks loaded with flour aid for North Korea crossed the tense border Tuesday for the first time since the communist country shelled a frontline island. The shipment followed a ceremony attended by some 30 people from the Korean Council for Reconciliation and Cooperation, a Seoul-based civic group, at the Imjingak tourist site near the border.
"We hope our humanitarian aid will lead to fresh inter-Korean ties," council head Kim Deog-Ryong told reporters as 12 trucks carrying a total of 300 tons of flour headed for the North Korean city of Sariwon. According to a spokesman for South Korea's Unification Ministry, the flour will be sent to a nursery, a children's hospital and a kindergarten.
The council said it would send some 2,500 tons of flour including Tuesday's shipment by the end of August if it wins approval from the Seoul government, which, by law, must approve all cross-border contacts. "We believe our aid will play a positive role in creating a favorable mood for inter-Korean dialogue and easing tensions on the Korean peninsula," it said in a statement.
Worsening relations
As relations worsened in 2008, Seoul halted an annual government shipment of 400,000 tons of rice to its impoverished neighbor, although it allowed some civilian groups to keep sending aid. Then, last year, after North Korea shelled Yeonpyeong Island and killed four South Koreans, Seoul suspended approval for civilian flour shipments to the north.
Foreign Minister Kim Sung-Hwan has said that unexpected talks between nuclear envoys from North and South Korea on the sidelines of an Asian security conference in Indonesia last week “opened the gate" for ties but cautioned that it would take time to build up relations.
These talks were the first since the December 2008 collapse of the so-called six-nation talks, which had been aimed at encouraging North Korea to give up its nuclear ambitions in return for diplomatic and economic rewards. In April 2009 North Korea announced it was quitting the forum in anger at UN condemnation of its long-range missile launch. In May 2009, it staged a second nuclear test.
Chronic food shortages
The North, where hundreds of thousands of people died in a famine in the 1990s, suffers chronic food shortages. It has depended on foreign aid to help feed its 23 million people. United Nations agencies say more than six million people are in urgent need of food aid.
The impoverished North has asked the United States and other nations and organizations around the world for aid, complaining that bad weather, rising global food prices, and the termination of aid from principle donors such as South Korea and the United States had slashed supplies. The United States sent an aid assessment team to North Korea in May but Washington has yet to announce whether or not it will resume aid. The European Union said this month that it would deliver ten million euros in emergency food aid to the country to help 650,000 people who are facing starvation.
Author: Shivani Mathur (dapd, AFP, Reuters)
Editor: Sarah Berning