North Korea welcomed yesterday a US decision to provide the impoverished country with food aid, saying the move will help promote "understanding and confidence" between the two countries.
“The DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea] is ready to provide all technical conditions necessary for the food delivery,” Pyongyang’s official Korean Central News Agency said.
“The food aid of the US government will help settle the food shortage in the DPRK to a certain extent and contribute to promoting the understanding and confidence between the peoples of the two countries,” it said.
The US said on Friday it will send 500,000 tonnes of emergency food aid to North Korea over the next year under a deal with Pyongyang permitting better monitoring of deliveries.
The US Agency for International Development (USAID) said it hoped shipments, which were suspended in January 2006 when Pyongyang “severely limited humanitarian monitoring and access,” would resume next month under the deal.
“We’re responding to a situation in dire need,” USAID spokesman David Snider said as US experts warned that North Korea faced the risk of a new famine, a decade after up to 1 million people died of starvation.
Snider said North Korea itself estimates it is 1.5 million tonnes short of its minimum requirements to prevent a critical food shortage, but he added that outside experts fear the gap could be even greater.
South Korean President Lee Myung-bak said on Friday he believed humanitarian aid should be dealt with separately from political issues.
“Large-scale economic cooperation or investment in the North should be carried out in accordance with the pace of progress in the nuclear issue,” Lee said when he met with New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark in Seoul.
“However, I think we should offer humanitarian aid ... regardless of the nuclear issue,” he said.
He said he was “concerned” whether outside help for the North might be seriously cut because of high food prices in the world.
He made the remarks a day after his foreign minister Yoo Myung-hwan said Seoul wanted direct talks with North Korea to discuss providing food aid, apparently softening Seoul’s position that Pyongyang must first ask for help.
The “understanding” to resume US food aid followed talks in North Korea, focusing on finding better ways to monitor deliveries.
The kinds of food to be distributed will be determined by a joint assessment conducted over the next few weeks, the USAID statement said.
Experts will meet in Pyongyang “in the near future” to work out details of the aid.
Chronic food shortages in the North worsened this year because of soaring grain prices, crop damage following floods last summer and dwindling foreign donations.
The North, which staged its first nuclear test in October 2006, is disabling its plants under a deal reached last year.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
CONFIDENT ON DEAL: ‘Ukraine wants a seat at the table, but wouldn’t the people of Ukraine have a say? It’s been a long time since an election, the US president said US President Donald Trump on Tuesday criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and added that he was more confident of a deal to end the war after US-Russia talks. Trump increased pressure on Zelenskiy to hold elections and chided him for complaining about being frozen out of talks in Saudi Arabia. The US president also suggested that he could meet Russian President Vladimir Putin before the end of the month as Washington overhauls its stance toward Russia. “I’m very disappointed, I hear that they’re upset about not having a seat,” Trump told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida when asked about the Ukrainian
RSS