U.S. Halted Food Aid to N. Korea in August

Not surprisingly, the North reneged on the agreements it made with USAID to get food aid. Its interest is in feeding its elite, our interest is in feeding those in greatest need, and there’s little overlap between those two groups. It’s more surprising to see Americans with the courage to hold North Koreans to their commitments. We are now learning that things broke down last August, and that most of the food aid was never delivered.

A much-heralded U.S. program to restart food aid to North Korea has run into difficulty as Washington and Pyongyang haggle over the terms of access, according to U.S. and overseas officials. The previously undisclosed problems come amid estimates of growing hunger in the isolated communist country.

A report released Monday by the U.N. World Food Program and Food and Agriculture Organization said that despite a better-than-usual harvest, more than a third of North Korea’s population will need food aid in the coming year. The agencies’ estimate of the number of hungry has jumped from 6.2 million to 8.7 million.

U.S. officials noted that food aid delivered via nongovernmental organizations continues but acknowledged that the main effort — through the World Food Program — has stalled. They said they are trying to resolve the problems, which concern disputes over the number of U.S. personnel in Pyongyang and Korean-speaking U.N. employees around the country.

“The United States seeks to fully implement the terms of the food aid agreement with the DPRK, which included agreed-upon improvements in monitoring and access conditions that are necessary to effectively ensure food is reaching those most in need,” State Department spokesman Robert A. Wood said, referring to North Korea’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. [WaPo, Glenn Kessler]

Kessler, who can’t even find fault with North Korea for starving its own people, uses words such as “haggle” to suggest that both sides are equally to blame. I wish his article provided fewer rhetorical flourishes and more specificity about what the actual disputes were. Instead, Kessler goes on to quote U.N. official Tony Banbury’s predictions about how bad things may well get in North Korea if food aid is not delivered. But isn’t all that beyond the point if our aid won’t reach the people who need it?

You won’t read it in the Post’s story, but I’m told that the hero of this story is USAID official John Brouse. Since the North Koreans first asked us for food last spring, Brouse has credibly threatened to walk away if the North Koreans did not allow significant improvement in monitoring. The North did make some concessions, but started to go back on them within just a few weeks. And in a rare demonstration of spine, we stood our ground and refused to deliver aid we knew would be doled out according to political pedigree or used as a weapon.