North Korea turns away Western aid
Jonathan Watts in Pyongyang
Sunday October 2, 2005
The Observer
North Korea has begun to reverse market reforms by kicking out international relief workers and choking off supplies of food and medical aid in a crackdown that puts millions of the country's children and elderly at risk.
In what one resident described as the biggest change in the humanitarian situation in 10 years, the government in Pyongyang is attempting to regain control over the distribution of essential supplies that have increasingly been provided by the market and outside donors.
As of yesterday, stall-holders have been ordered to stop trading in cereals, including rice. From now on they can only be sold at controlled prices through the state's public distribution system.
This is not the only regressive step. In August the government told foreign non-governmental organisations that they must leave by the end of the year. Groups such as the World Food Programme and the Red Cross and Red Crescent - which have fed more than a fifth of the country's 23 million population and provided two-thirds of essential drugs since the famines of the mid-Nineties - will have to stop providing food and medicine on 1 January.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1583022,00.html
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