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SEOUL : South Korea ruled out providing massive food aid to North Korea after Pyongyang requested humanitarian assistance from Seoul at their latest Red Cross talks, officials said on Sunday.
Both sides on Friday discussed arranging more reunions for families separated since the 1950-1953 war but failed to reach an agreement, as the North called for an unspecified amount of food aid from the South.
South Korea used to send around 400,000 tons (440,000 tonnes) of rice and 300,000 tons of fertiliser a year to its impoverished northern neighbour, which suffers persistent severe food shortages.
Shipments ended and relations deteriorated after a conservative administration came to power in Seoul in February 2008 and linked food aid and economic cooperation to progress in the North's nuclear disarmament.
The South is currently considering providing food aid - in much smaller amounts than before - for infants or children vulnerable to famine and illness in the North, Seoul's unification ministry said on Sunday.
"The aid will be made by the Red Cross and so it will be difficult to provide large-scale" shipments, a top ministry official told South Korean journalists, according to ministry spokeswoman Lee Jong-Joo.
No decisions had been made yet on how much aid would be provided, Lee said, in response to local reports that it would be less than 50,000 tonnes of corn.
At Friday's Red Cross talks, the South proposed that more family reunions should be held next month and next February.
As part of a series of conciliatory gestures which began in August, the North agreed a temporary family reunion programme for the first time in almost two years.
Hundreds of family members, separated by minefields and barbed wire, held brief emotional reunions in the North at the end of last month. - AFP/ms
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