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North Korea Food Shortages Seen Getting Worse
Fri June 13, 2003 04:24 AM ET
By Paul Eckert

SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korea's food situation, shaky for the past decade as the communist state battles famine and deepening international isolation, appears to be worsening this year, a veteran relief worker said on Friday.

Kathi Zellweger, who heads relief efforts for North Korea of the Catholic charity group Caritas, said that on the most recent of her 42 visits to the country, people displayed a "deep fear" of a U.S. attack over Pyongyang's nuclear weapons programs.

She said Pyongyang's political isolation because of an eight-month-old nuclear impasse compounded problems of donor fatigue and shocks from economic policy changes in the North.

U.N. agencies have been forced to reduce operations that have fed about a third of the 22 million North Koreans for the past five years, and warned of dire shortfalls in coming months.

"We at Caritas also have indications that the situation is slipping back into a much more difficult period," Zellweger told Reuters in an interview in Seoul. "We have horrendous difficulties in raising money to help North Korea."

Describing North Korea as "an industrialized country on a downward spiral," she said its chronic energy shortages and lack of access to foreign markets and capital had hobbled industries that might earn cash to buy food it can not produce.

A sweeping overhaul of prices and salaries introduced nearly a year ago had fostered an awareness of modern market economics in the strictly planned economy, but also brought great pain.

"We see more haves and have-nots developing," Zellweger said.

Many North Korean refugees who have settled in South Korea say they never saw or heard of foreign food aid when they lived in the North -- raising suspicions that communist officials were pocketing aid or diverting it to the powerful military.

But Zellweger said aid seldom reaches North Korean adults because relief agencies focus their limited resources on feeding the most vulnerable groups, such as children and pregnant women.

"An adult will not see food aid, because he is not on any beneficiary list," she said. "We tend to feed the most vulnerable, but even for the average adult, life is a struggle."

North Korea issues ominous threats in the showdown with the United States over Pyongyang's nuclear brinkmanship, but Zellweger said the country lived in "deep fear" of a U.S. attack.

"North Koreans have watched very, very carefully what has happened in Iraq and they feel they that they are next in the firing line," she said.