‘Don’t use food aid as a weapon’

THE BISHOP of Hereford has criticised the decision by the United States and South Korea to withhold food aid from North Korea.

Bishop Anthony Priddis said that 27 per cent of the country’s population were suffering from malnutrition.

In a House of Lords debate he said that 40 years ago the country’s GDP was twice that of South Korea’s but now it was 30 times smaller – a 60-fold difference – and the situation had been aggravated by famines and natural disasters.

“On average, boys in North Korea are five inches shorter than their South Korean counterparts and weigh 25 pounds less. Malnutrition, of course, leads not only to physical weakness but to intellectual impairment,” he said. “It leads to a frail population and makes the people especially vulnerable to disease.”

And Bishop Priddis told peers: “In those circumstances, we need to think very carefully about the morality of food being used as a weapon of war or coercion.

“Surely it can never be right to withhold food from starving people as a way of punishing their leaders.

“It was a tragedy that the £126 million food programme which the United States had generously decided to put in place last year was literally blown off the agenda by North Korea’s decision to launch a satellite nine months ago.

“However, the North Korean leadership should also reflect on the morality of spending vast sums on developing a nuclear capability and on maintaining the world’s fourth largest standing army when they cannot feed their own people. That is surely a scandalous and immoral misuse of resources.

“South Korea’s decision to withhold food aid, supported by the Obama Administration, has inevitably put innocent lives at risk while doing nothing to bring about the end of the conflict between north and south. You cannot starve people into submission and you should never try.”

He said organisations that took food and medicine into the country were often inspired to do so by their Christian faith and yet North Korea was regularly ranked as the place where Christians were most persecuted.

“Christians are motivated by love, believing that each person is made in the image of God and, because of that, worthy of the utmost respect and elevation of their human dignity,” he said.

“Religious freedom would bring untold blessings to North Korea, not least through the provision of sustained and significant programmes providing for food, education, welfare and health.”