Feeding North Korea.(Catherine Bertini, United Nations. World Food Program)(Brief Article)(Interview)

Millions of North Koreans depend on Catherine Bertini for their next meal. As executive director of the U.N. World Food Program, she oversees a humanitarian operation that has sent more than $900 million in food aid to that nation since 1995 and feeds about a third of the country's people. Bertini spoke to NEWSWEEK's George Wehrfritz following her trip to North Korea last month. Excerpts:

WEHRFRITZ: Some members of the aid community have come to believe that food aid is enabling Kim Jong Il's regime and preventing the kind of change that will ultimately be necessary to fix North Korea. Is that not a valid argument?

BERTINI: And therefore all the food aid should be stopped so that, for heaven knows how long, people would starve to death because we don't like the [North Korean] government? That's an immoral position.

Is it always the case that where there is famine, the WFP gives aid?

We never say "We don't like the government, so we won't send food" if that food is the difference between life and death. We send food to southern Sudan, where we have to spend millions of extra dollars dropping it out of airplanes. We send food to Angola. We send food to Afghanistan. We send food everywhere.

You've returned from your fourth trip to North Korea. What's the situation?

In 1997 we saw many children in schools who were malnourished, who had orange hair and extended bellies and were skeletal. Our monitors have been going to the schools since [then], and so they've seen that the children are far healthier. But we also saw children in pediatric hospitals who were emaciated, malnourished and had diarrhea. The [situation] is stable but precarious.