Seoul: North Korea today welcomed a US decision to provide the impoverished country with food aid, saying the move will help promote "understanding and confidence" between the two countries.

"The DPRK (North Korea) is ready to provide all technical conditions necessary for the food delivery," Pyongyang's official Korean Central News Agency said.

"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.

The United States yesterday said it will send 500,000 metric tonnes of emergency food aid to North Korea over the next year under a deal with Pyongyang permitting 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 told AFP as US experts warned that North Korea faced the risk of a new famine, a decade after up to one million people died of starvation.

Snider said North Korea itself estimates it is 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.

South Korean President Lee Myung-Bak said yesterday he believed humanitarian aid should be dealt seperately from political issues. "Large-scale economic cooperation or investment in the North should be carried out in accordance with the pace of progress in the nuclear issue," Lee said when he met with New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark here.
Source : PTI