HONG KONG: North Korea’s declared intention to resume its nuclear programme has further jeopardized a critical lifeline to millions of the country’s most impoverished citizens whose survival could depend on international assistance, diplomats and aid officials said on Monday.

“Obviously this can’t help,” commented an Asia-based aid specialist dealing with the issue. “We can’t be optimistic.”

Another aid official said donor countries were showing a reluctance to pledge new commitments of humanitarian assistance to North Korea for next year in part because of the nuclear issue. Although isolated from much of the world diplomatically, Pyongyang receives desperately needed humanitarian aid ranging from health and nutritional care to food grain, mainly through the United Nations.

Since the United Nations’ World Food Programme first began delivering grain and rice to North Korea in the mid-1990s to ease suffering from years of famine, it has grown to become the UN agency’s biggest-ever project. It began this year by targeting 6.4 million people — about one-quarter of the country’s 24 million people. But the first-ever shortfall of donations — one that began well before the present political crisis — has cut the number of recipients by nearly half since September, according to Beijing- based World Food Programme spokesman Gerald Bourke.

A 1998 nutritional survey conducted after international aid first began to flow found nearly two-thirds of all children studied suffered from chronic malnutrition. While conditions are believed to have improved since then, the new escalation of tensions could quickly exacerbate conditions in the country, aid officials believe. As an indicator of the new pressure on Pyongyang, a North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman on Monday accused the United States of setting “unreasonable conditions” for continuing its food deliveries and “obstructing humanitarian aid by every possible means and method, even politicizing it.”

“That’s wrong,” a senior State Department official said Monday, adding that President Bush has repeatedly stated that America will not use food as a weapon.—Dawn/The Los Angeles Times News Service.