The House of Representatives has voted to bar official US food assistance to North Korea, with lawmakers fearing that the aid would prop up the hardline Communist regime.
The Republican-led House, in discussions on agriculture appropriations late on Wednesday night, approved by voice vote an amendment that would bar aid to North Korea through the US government’s “Food for Peace” program.
Impoverished North Korea is seeking food from overseas and last month invited a US envoy to assess its needs. Relief groups have said that North Korea faces imminent shortages, although US lawmakers have been sceptical.
Representative Ed Royce, a Republican from California who authored the amendment, said it would be wrong to send food to North Korea at a time that Kim Jong-Il’s regime is pursuing nuclear weapons.
“Let’s be clear, the aid we provide would prop up Kim Jong-Il’s regime, a brutal and dangerous dictatorship,” Mr Royce said in a statement.
He quoted a North Korean defector, Kim Duk-Hong, as saying that food aid, “is the same as providing funding for North Korea’s nuclear programme because it allows Kim Jong-Il to divert resources.”
US-based Christian-oriented relief groups want to send food to North Korea. The groups are non-governmental but in the past have relied heavily on US official support, including shipping.
President Barack Obama’s administration has said it is still assessing North Korea’s request. Some policymakers in his Democratic Party, which controls the Senate, have said that food aid should be separate from politics and that the United States could earn goodwill by sending food packages marked as US gifts.
But some US and South Korean officials have voiced concern that the regime may be exaggerating its needs as it tries to stock up for national celebrations in 2012 marking the 100th anniversary of the regime’s founder Kim Il-Sung.
Hundreds of thousands of North Koreans died in a famine in the 1990s. US relief groups that visited earlier this year said that some North Koreans were again eating grass and tree bark.