|PIC1|Officials from the World Food Programme arrived in North Korea Tuesday to discuss resuming food aid to the country. Emergency food deliveries ended last year over disagreements on the conditions for supplying the food.

The officials discussed plans for a downsized food aid programme to the closed Stalinist state that would run over two years and focus on the provision of food to mothers and children.

The scale of the food programme, if approved, will be considerably smaller than other programmes run by the WFP in the past which used to feed 6.5 million each year.

The WFP’s board in Rome has allotted US$102 million to the plan that will feed around 1.9 million people, the WFP’s spokesman, Gerald Bourke, said in Beijing on Tuesday.

|AD|"The donors on the executive board expressed pretty serious concern about the operating conditions that were on offer and gave us a mandate to try and better them," said Bourke.

"While they have approved the operation in principle, it still has to be funded and resourced," he said.

The UN agency originally began shipping food to North Korea in the mid-1990s after a famine killed an estimated 2.5 million people, and during its 10 years in North Korea, the WFP grew to be its largest humanitarian agency.

Analysts suspected the decision by Pyongyang last year to end food aid from the WFP lay in the North Korean government feeling threatened by the foreign presence.

The new WFP is due to start on April 1 but is now expected to be delayed. Once it begins, around 2 million women and young children will be provided with 150,000 tonnes of food.

"Until donors are happy, they're not going to be too inclined to resource the operation," Bourke said.