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SEOUL : North Korea on Saturday welcomed a US decision to provide the country with badly needed food aid, saying the move would help promote "understanding and confidence" between the two nations.
The United States said on Friday it would send 500,000 tonnes of emergency food aid to the impoverished country over the next year under a new deal with Pyongyang, after shipments were suspended in 2006.
Some analysts have warned that North Korea is on the verge of another famine, a decade after up to one million of its people died of starvation.
"The DPRK (North Korea) is ready to provide all technical conditions necessary for the food delivery," Pyongyang's official Korean Central News Agency said Saturday.
"The food aid of the US government will help settle the food shortage in the DPRK to a certain extent and contribute to promoting the understanding and confidence between the peoples of the two countries," it said.
Operational details of the deal have not been worked out, but US officials say Pyongyang is expected to permit better monitoring of deliveries.
The US Agency for International Development (USAID) said it hoped shipments, which were suspended in January 2006 when the Stalinist state "severely limited humanitarian monitoring and access," would resume in June under the deal.
"We're responding to a situation in dire need," USAID spokesman David Snider said.
Snider told AFP that North Korea itself estimated it was 1.5 million tonnes short of its minimum requirements to prevent a critical food shortage, but he added that outside experts fear the gap could be even greater.
The United States hopes to make up for a third of the shortfall with North Korea receiving 400,000 tonnes through the World Food Programme (WFP) and about 100,000 tonnes via US non-governmental organisations.
Chronic food shortages worsened this year due to soaring grain prices, crop damage following floods last summer and dwindling foreign donations.
"It's a hugely significant contribution," WFP spokeswoman Jennifer Parmelee told AFP. "It's very timely."
State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said meanwhile that "there is no connection" between the food aid and dragged-out negotiations aimed at scrapping North Korea's nuclear weapons programmes.
The "understanding" to resume food aid comes after a team of US government experts returned to Washington from talks last week in North Korea and discussions had centered on finding better ways to monitor deliveries.
"The two sides have agreed on terms for a substantial improvement in monitoring and access in order to allow for confirmation of receipt by the intended recipients," a USAID statement said.
The kinds of food to be distributed would be determined by a joint assessment conducted over the next few weeks, the statement said.
Experts would meet in the North Korean capital Pyongyang "in the near future" to work out operational matters and the launch of the aid.
Until it suspended deliveries, the United States had provided about two million tonnes of wheat and other food aid to North Korea through the WFP since 1995, according to USAID.
The WFP said the United States was the "biggest historical donor" to its programme for North Korea, having provided a total of 665 million dollars worth of food since the UN food agency launched operations there in 1995.
South Korea said Thursday it wanted direct talks with North Korea to discuss providing badly needed food aid, apparently softening its position that the communist state must first ask for help. - AFP/ms
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