WFP Meets with North Korean Officials to Discuss Food Aid

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.