NEWS STORY: Korean-Americans raise $100,000 for North Korean famine relief

c. 1997 Religion News Service WASHINGTON _ Korean-Americans, expressing concern that some 2.4 million children in North Korea face starvation as the communist country enters the second year of famine, have raised $100,000 for hunger relief efforts. The funds were raised by the newly formed Korean American Sharing Movement (KASM), a relief and development organization, […]

c. 1997 Religion News Service

WASHINGTON _ Korean-Americans, expressing concern that some 2.4 million children in North Korea face starvation as the communist country enters the second year of famine, have raised $100,000 for hunger relief efforts.

The funds were raised by the newly formed Korean American Sharing Movement (KASM), a relief and development organization, and came primarily from grassroots Korean-Americans, many in churches in the Washington, D.C.-Baltimore area.


At a news conference Thursday (April 3) announcing the fund-raising effort, the group also called on the Clinton administration”to initiate a large-scale government-to-government”humanitarian aid effort to provide up to one-fourth of the estimated food aid North Korea needs to stave off starvation.

The United States has pledged $10 million to the World Food Program effort in North Korea, and South Korea has agreed to give $6 million. On Wednesday, State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns said he believed ships carrying the U.S.-sponsored aid were on their way to North Korea.

On Thursday, however, Reuters reported from Seoul that South Korean and U.S. officials had agreed that any further large-scale food or economic aid to North Korea must wait until the North Korean government joins proposed four-nation peace talks aimed at securing a lasting peace to replace the armistice that ended the Korean War in 1953.

Relief agencies, including the World Peace Program, have estimated that North Korea faces a 2.3 million-ton food deficit and pledges from the international community, including governments and religious relief groups, can provide only about 10 percent of the food needed.

On Tuesday, World Vision, the independent evangelical relief agency, said it expects a 1,000-ton shipment of rice, purchased in Vietnam, to arrive in North Korea by April 21.

Church World Service, the relief and development arm of the National Council of Churches, which has already sent nearly $500,000 in rice, beef and medicines to North Korea, has initiated a new $500,000 appeal for famine assistance.

At Thursday’s news conference, Sang Hoon Lee, KASM’s chairman, said his group believes almost all of North Korea’s 24 million people are currently enduring severe hunger.”We are glad to do what we can, but we know current efforts, including our own, are not enough to solve the North Korean humanitarian crisis,”he said in urging stronger U.S. government action.


He said his group is especially concerned about the more than 2 million children suffering from lack of food.”We ask first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton to help lead efforts to help feed 2.4 million Korean children under 6 years old,”he said.”It will take a global village to raise North Korean children,”he added in a reference to Mrs. Clinton’s popular book on children,”It Takes a Village.””North Korean children, many already skeletal after several years of hunger, are threatened with famine,”he said.”They are getting shorter and thinner due to years of malnutrition, potentially leaving an entire cohort physically and mentally immature for the rest of their lives.” KASM raised the $100,000 in just seven weeks, according to officials, and the funds have been given to the Eugene Bell Centennial Foundation to buy and transport food to North Korea.

The money will buy an estimated 500 tons of quality corn.

The Bell Foundation, which supports educational, humanitarian and religious projects, is named after the Rev. Eugene Bell, a Presbyterian missionary who served in Korea 100 years ago.

Stephen Linton, chair of the foundation board, said he hopes there will be enough money by late April to buy an additional 500 tons of grain. The organization plans to deliver the food in April, and has been given permission by the North Korean government to monitor grain distribution.

“The response has been far too little,” Linton said. “The North Korea famine is less attractive from a fund-raising point of view” than the Ethiopian famine in the mid-1980s during which aid groups raised millions of dollars, often based on dramatic pictures of starving children.

Linton, who is also a research associate at Columbia University specializing in North Korea, says the starvation in North Korea will “absolutely be worse than the Ethiopian famine” unless both government and non-government organizations realize the importance of sending aid.

MJP END RNS

Donate to Support Independent Journalism!

Donate Now!