S Koreans Donating Bread To Feed N Korean Children

by Ahn Mi-Young

This program has been underway since 2001. To many South Korean activists, the success of schemes like this underscore the need to keep North Korea's humanitarian needs separate from political issues such as the North's nuclear program and calls by some for economic sanctions on the already struggling country.

This bread campaign, run by the Korean Welfare Foundation (KWF), now reaches some 15,000 children in about 17 kindergartens and 18 nurseries in Pyongyang.

That is a but a drop compared to the 8 million people in North Korea -- half of them children -- whom UN special envoy Maurice Strong says are in a "life or death" situation in the country of 22 million people.

But "one bread for each kid at the lunch table is good enough to be a party there," said KWF director Kim Hyung-Seok.

Power outages in North Korea often prevent the factory's full operation, disrupting this modest assistance project. "Each time power is out, factory workers make bread with their hands, but can make only half what they usually make a day," said Kim.

The foundation's own factory in Pyongyang makes bread daily, using eggs, flour and butter brought by ship from South Korea.

Southern citizens had given donations for the factory's construction. Later, South Korea's oldest bakery 'Koryodang' sent its bakers to Pyongyang to teach Northerners how to make bread and add extra nutritional value to it.

Distribution is done by the foundation's North Korean partners, which include the National Reconciliation Council.

The foundation now wants to build a bigger factory, but the international tensions have increased uncertainty about the future, as concerns rise over whether a military conflict is possible, whether aid will continue going to North Korea.

But, UN officials say, North Korea's real humanitarian needs cannot be ignored while South Korea, China and now Russia try to break the standoff between Washington and Pyongyang in the wake of the North's admission of its secret uranium enrichment programme in October last year.

"You cannot make the children, the ill people, the old people victims of a political crisis with which they have had nothing to do," Strong said on Saturday after a three-day visit to North Korea.

"If we sit back, North Korea would almost have one generation of children disappear from its population in the worst case," John Powell of the World Food Programme (WFP) was quoted as saying by the Korean-language 'Joongang' newspaper. "It will take time to resolve the nuclear issue. But we should act now to help and feed North Korean children," pointed out Chung Hee-Gyung, dean of the Chungkang College of Cultural Industries in Seoul.

UN officials were already worried by declining food aid in recent years. In 2002, the WFP fed 3.4 million people, down from 6.4 million in 2001, most of them children.

As the WFP cut back its programmes, one million North Korean children at primary schools have not had food rations since September. Another 460,000 in kindergartens have not had food rations since October, and 920,000 children in nursery homes likewise since November.

"As more international food aid comes to others in suffering nations, like Afghan refugees, less international aid is coming to North Korea," said Kim of the Korea Welfare Foundation. "There is a trend of fatigue in international aid toward North Korea following six years of concentration of international aid efforts on the country during 1995 to 2001."

North Korea's nuclear measures - and the fallout from it are likely to dampen interest in giving humanitarian assistance, activists here fear.

Already, U.S. food aid to North Korea fell from 300,000 tonnes in 2001 to 155,000 tons in 2002. Japan has virtually suspended food delivery to North Korea since the start of 2002.

Local activists estimate that foreign aid to North Korea has fallen from $360 million in 1999 to half that in 2000, and is expected to have declined further in 2002.

"The first victims of North Korea's nuclear action are its starving children who have nothing to do with politics," said Chung Jung-Ae, a KWF member. "What these children badly need is just one cup of milk, potato soup and bread just to survive."

Local media reports quote WFP officials as saying that the UN agency secured only 35,000 tonnes of food for North Korea as of early January 2003 -- one third of what it needs to implement for the country in the first quarter of 2003.

Meantime, humanitarian and religious groups are urging South Koreans to donate what they can to the North. Southern NGOs raised $65 million for North Korea in 2002, up from $35 million in 2000.

"If you donate 5,000 won (4 U.S. dollars), you could feed one North Korean child for a month" is what a KWF campaigner explains, while collecting clothes, medicine and powdered milk too.

"We must train South Korean children to think of North Korean children not as aid recipients but as friends," said Chung Buyong-Ho, a cultural anthropology professor at Hanyang University here.

Children from the two Koreas have different human development indicators. Chronic lack of nutrition means that a seven-year-old North Korean child has an average height of 105 cm, compared to the South Korean's 125cm.

Some here say that South Korea should look after its own poor first. But Chung argued: "It's a matter of poverty when a South Korean child is starving. But it is a matter of survival when a North Korean child is starving. Unless fed today, that child would be seriously malnourished or even die."