Monitoring team oversees food aid to ravaged
North Korea
By DENNIS CODAY
Special to the National Catholic Reporter Bangkok,
Thailand
Representatives for Catholic Relief
Services are part of an eight-member team now in North Korea to monitor a
United Nations food assistance program.
The monitoring team arrived in the Peoples Democratic
Republic of Korea Feb. 20 to oversee the distribution of 75,000 metric tons of
U.S.-donated wheat through the U.N.s World Food Program. The food aid
will go to six of North Koreas nine major provinces including North
Hamgyong, an area particularly hard-hit by the countrys persistent food
shortage.
The monitoring team is the fourth CRS has sent to North Korea
since August 1997. CRS works with a consortium of U.S.-based private voluntary
organizations, including Amigos Internacionales, CARE, Mercy Corps and World
Vision, to provide monitoring teams for the U.N.-sponsored program. This team
expects to complete the assignment in July.
CRS asked Maryknoll Frs. Thomas Dunleavy and Gerald Patrick
OConnor to serve as their representatives on the monitoring team. The
Maryknoll priests have extensive experience in Asia and with relief work.
OConnor, who speaks Korean, has held various pastoral positions in South
Korea since about 1971. Dunleavy, who is based in Bangkok, has most recently
served as Maryknolls coordinator for refugee programs for all of
Asia.
Food-for-work programs
They and other team members will oversee food-for-work programs in
North Korea. Families whose members work on projects to rebuild dikes,
irrigation ditches and roads receive a monthly food ration. A CRS statement
said, Food-for-work projects will support agricultural rehabilitation and
contribute to the countrys food security by reclaiming and protecting
North Koreas scarce arable land.
North Korea has been ravaged for the last several years by the
decline of its economy and more recently by floods and drought, which have
sparked food shortages of massive proportions and the collapse of water,
sanitation, health and other social services. The country has relied on food
aid to feed its people since 1995. Estimates on the death toll from famine
since then range from one million to three million.
The World Food Program, UNICEF and the European Union conducted a
nutrition survey in North Korea in September and October 1998. They found that
60 percent of children 6 months to 7 years old suffered from moderate or severe
malnutrition and 16 percent of the children suffered acute malnutrition. This
puts North Korea among the top 10 countries with the highest malnutrition rates
in the world, according to the World Food Program.
The survey sampled 130 of the countrys 212 counties,
representing more than 15 million people of which 2.1 million are children
under the age of 7. North Korea has a total population of between 22 and 23
million people.
Sixty-two percent of the children surveyed showed stunted growth
for their age. The survey report said that this indicates that the nutrition
problem has probably existed in the country for many years. Wasting, which
affected 16 percent of the children, reflects the current problem, the report
said.
A major concern of the donors is that the food aid gets to
ordinary citizens and not to North Koreas million-man army. James
DeHarpporte, the CRS regional coordinator based in Jakarta, Indonesia, said,
Were quite certain that the food is going to the
villagers.
The monitors travel to sites to watch the food distribution and to
check on progress of the various building projects. We see the villagers.
We see the work. We check the records, DeHarpporte said. We do
checks on all of that.
He added that the monitoring teams are themselves closely
monitored by North Korean government officials. Inspections are planned and
interactions are not spontaneous.
Our first objective is to provide humanitarian assistance to
people who are starving, DeHarpporte said. Secondly, to create
better understanding and reconciliation between Americans and North
Koreans and between North Koreans and South Koreans.
Solidarity with the poor
A third objective is to express our solidarity with the
poor, he said, and to do so in collaboration with Caritas agencies
and others also working to alleviate the crisis in the north. Caritas is
an international Catholic network of relief and development aid programs. CRS
is the member from the U.S. Catholic bishops.
In late April, a CRS delegation will travel to Pyongyang to
deliver a mobile X-ray unit to a North Korean hospital. The request for the
X-ray unit had been presented to a delegation from the Vaticans
Secretariat of State during a trip to North Korea in 1998.
In addition to its work with monitoring teams, CRS has provided
nearly $1 million in private direct relief for North Korea since 1996. Much of
this was for food purchased by Caritas Hong Kong and Caritas Japan. With other
donations from the Caritas network, CRS has also provided food and medicines in
programs that reach primarily children in schools and orphanages.
National Catholic Reporter, March 19,
1999
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