hankyoreh

During inter-Korean talks held July 13 in Busan, the North Korean delegation told unification minister Lee Jong-seok that authorities in North Korea "will have no choice but to feed the people with military rations" if the South does not give it rice aid, an unnamed government source said Friday.

According to the source, the North’s top delegate told his Southern counterparts that Pyongyang has "two months of corn powder and wheat bran in reserves as military provisions."

"If the South doesn’t give us rice, we'll have no choice but to use them to feed the starving people," he was quoted as saying. He is also said to have said it is the South’s fault that the North Korean people are "starving."

The government is interpreting the comment to be both a reflection of the desperate food situation and a strategy of bluffing in order to pressure the South into continuing its rice and fertilizer aid, the source said.

"We never said we weren’t going to provide rice aid, we said we would stop discussions about aid until the North has changed its attitude about [its missile program] and the six-party talks," said another key government figure. "If it is so desperate about food, it should give up its hard-line approach to the outside world and return to the six-party talks."

On Thursday, the United Nations World Food Programme announced that in 2005, North Korea received 1.079 million tons of food aid, 23.1 percent more than in 2004, more than any country but Ethiopia. Last year, the North received 531,000 tons of food from China, 393,000 from South Korea, 48,000 tons from Japan, 28,000 from the United States, and 15,000 from Australia.