Shaw Capital Management News:(2nd LD) U.N. aid officials to visit S. Korea amid dire food shortages in N. Korea

By Sam Kim
SEOUL, March 25 (Yonhap) — A team of U.N. food agency officials, including a recent visitor to North Korea, will travel to South Korea next week, a government source said Friday, amid a flurry of activities indicating the international community is moving to resume food aid to the North.
The trip by four World Food Program (WFP) officials, including a donor relations director, will begin Monday and last through Thursday as they meet with foreign and unification ministry officials here, the source said, speaking on the condition of anonymity, citing policy.
Unification Ministry spokesman Chun Hae-sung confirmed in a briefing the trip would take place next week, but said he was unaware whether the delegation would include a researcher who recently traveled to North Korea to look into food shortages there.
The WFP visit comes after the U.N. said in a report Thursday (Washington time) that about a quarter of North Korea’s population of 24 million is in dire need of food, calling for 470,000 tons of international aid.
It also comes as former U.S. President Jimmy Carter is preparing to make his second trip in about eight months to North Korea on a visit that the State Department described as “strictly private.”
One of the world’s poorest countries, North Korea has heavily depended on outside handouts since it suffered a massive famine that is estimated to have killed up to 2 million people in the mid-1990s.
But food assistance to North Korea has dried up significantly since North Korea conducted a string of missile and nuclear tests in defiance of international warnings. Holding its neighbor responsible for threatening regional security, South Korea — once the largest provider of rice and fertilizer — has also suspended its assistance since 2008, prompting the North to react aggressively.
Dismissing speculation the South was considering plans to resume food aid to the North, Unification Ministry spokesman Chun said that his government was looking at offers by civilian groups to send relief assistance “in a purely humanitarian light.”
In October, the North’s Red Cross had sought 300,000 tons of rice and 500,000 tons of fertilizer from the South, which refused it, saying the amount was far from being on a humanitarian scale.
In a possible development that may pave the way for the sides to ease their animosity, South and North Korea agreed earlier this week to go ahead with a meeting of experts to conduct joint research on possible volcanic activities at a North Korean mountain.
The Unification Ministry said Friday it sent the North a list of four scholars, including one from a state-run geology institute, to take part in the meeting next week at a South Korean border city.
Tension between the two Koreas spiked to the highest level in at least a decade when the North bombarded a South Korean island in November last year. Seoul also holds Pyongyang responsible for the deadly sinking of one of its warships in the Yellow Sea a year ago.
Denouncing the North for the series of developments that claimed a total of 50 South Korean lives, including 46 on the Cheonan corvette, South Korean activists have held a string of rallies near the border, sending anti-Pyongyang leaflets in balloons.
North Korea renewed its warning on Wednesday that it would fire at a site used to send propaganda leaflets, rekindling border tension. Park Sang-hak, one of the activists, said Friday their plan to send leaflets from the western front-line island of Baengnyeong was postponed, accusing government authorities of hindering their propaganda material from being shipped.
Port officials cited bad weather as a reason for the failure to transport the leaflets and balloons by ship.
Residents on the island, fearing a deadly clash similar to one that broke out in the nearby island of Yeonpyeong last November, had vowed to stop the leaflets from being unloaded on the dock.
Analysts say the two Koreas, which remain technically at war after the 1950-53 Korean War ended in a truce, understand the importance of improvement in their ties as a step toward the resumption of six-party nuclear talks on the North.
The talks, which include the two Koreas, the U.S., Russia, Japan and China, were last held in December 2008. Despite the prolonged hiatus, the members of the negotiations consider them the only viable way to denuclearize the North through diplomatic means.
In a move that appeared to bode well for relations between Pyongyang and Washington, a North Korean economic delegation is on a U.S. tour at the invitation of a university there.
Ri Gun, director general of the North American affairs bureau of North Korea’s foreign ministry, is also scheduled to attend a seminar hosted by a U.S. think tank in Berlin on Saturday.