BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | North Korea refuses US food aid - 0 views
-
The US says North Korea has refused to accept any further food aid supplies. Five aid groups have been told to leave the North by the end of March, the State Department and aid groups said.
-
Last year, the UN World Food Programme said that almost nine million people - more than a third of the North Korean population - was in need of food aid.
-
"North Korea has informed the United States that it does not wish to receive additional US food assistance at this time," state department spokesman Robert Wood told reporters in Washington.
- ...3 more annotations...
-
Under a deal reached in June last year, the US agreed to distribute 500,000 metric tonnes of food to North Korea - 400,000 through the UN World Food Programme and the rest through NGOs.
-
The United Nations said on Monday that 6.9 million North Koreans have not received food aid they desperately need. Hundreds of thousands of people died in the reclusive state in a famine in the 1990s, and the North has relied on outside food aid ever since.
-
Pyongyang recently put its military on full combat alert and shut its border with the South, in what it said was retaliation for the recent annual military exercise by US and South Korean forces. In January, the North scrapped a series of peace agreements with the South over Seoul's decision to link bilateral aid to progress on de-nuclearisation.