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BRUSSELS — Responding to the growing threat of a humanitarian crisis in North Korea, the European Union announced on Monday that it will provide about $14.5 million in emergency aid to feed more than some 650,000 North Koreans.
The bloc’s executive body, the European Commission, said that after its experts witnessed evidence of a developing crisis last month during a mission to North Korea, it negotiated an agreement with the North Koreans about how to monitor the delivery of assistance.
“Increasingly desperate and extreme measures are being taken by the hard-hit North Koreans, including the widespread consumption of grass,” the European Commission said in a statement.
The severity of the situation prompted a switch of tactics by the commission. In 2008, it stopped sending humanitarian aid to North Korea in favor of offering financing for longer-term development projects.
“The purpose of this aid package is to save the lives of at least 650,000 people who could otherwise die from lack of food,” Kristalina Georgieva, a European commissioner, said in the statement. “Our experts saw severely malnourished children in hospitals and nurseries where no treatment was available.
“North Korea’s chronic nutrition problem is turning into an acute crisis in some parts of the country.”
Former President Jimmy Carter and two other former presidents, Mary Robinson of Ireland and Martti Ahtisaari of Finland, and former Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland of Norway traveled to North Korea in April and issued grave warnings about the food situation there. (All four are members of the Elders, an independent group of world leaders established by Nelson Mandela.)
Mr. Carter was particularly concerned about the refusal of the United States and South Korea to send humanitarian assistance to the North, saying their deliberate withholding of food aid amounted to “a human rights violation.”
Mr. Carter, 86, who was not traveling as an official American envoy, had been invited to North Korea for meetings with senior political and military officials.
Mrs. Robinson echoed Mr. Carter’s concerns about what she called the “very serious crisis” over food supplies in North Korea because of a harsh winter, severe flooding and an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease. She said the withdrawal of American and South Korean food shipments had aggravated a dire situation, which had become, she said, “a matter of life-and-death urgency.”
The United States recently sent a team of experts to evaluate food and hunger conditions in North Korea. But the Obama administration has not yet decided about a resumption of food shipments.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said recently that “North Korea must address our serious concerns about monitoring.” Integral to any agreement to restart American aid deliveries, she said, would be “our ability to ensure and monitor that whatever food aid is provided actually reaches the people who are in need.”
After his trip in April, Mr. Carter said North Korean officials had guaranteed to make changes to the aid-distribution system so that Western governments and donors could track their deliveries and be certain that their aid was not being diverted to the military or the ruling elite.
The European aid will be distributed through the World Food Program, which has been used by the United States and other countries and donors. Ms. Georgieva said it would be strictly monitored, from the point of delivery at ports to when it reached recipients.
“If at any stage we discover that the aid is being diverted from its intended recipients, then the commission will not hesitate to end its humanitarian intervention,” she said.
According to the European Commission, its experts found that in North Korea the state-distributed food rations had been more than halved in recent months. Two-thirds of the population depends on the rations, it said.
The per-person ration, which had been 400 grams of cereals per day, about 14 ounces, was reduced to 150 grams, about 5.3 ounces, in June. That is a fifth of the daily average nutritional requirement, according to European experts. Most of the rations consist of corn.
“Food assistance will reach children under 5 who have already been hospitalized with severe acute malnutrition,” the commission said in the statement. “Children in residential care will also be fed, as well as pregnant and breast-feeding women, hospital patients and the elderly.”
The food shortages have been caused by years of economic mismanagement and underinvestment, and have been made worse by poor weather and a reduction of food imports from China and South Korea. The next main grain harvest is in October.
Initially, the North Koreans had planned to import 353,000 tons of grains, but that target was reduced to 220,000 tons, of which about half has been secured so far, European experts said.
The North Korean government has promised unrestricted access for random checks related to the aid, the commission said. While distributing the European aid, the World Food Program will pay 400 visits per month to warehouses, institutions caring for children, hospitals and distribution sites.
Stephen Castle reported from Brussels and Mark McDonald from Seoul, South Korea.
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