NORTH KOREA SEEKING MORE RICE FROM JAPAN: JAPANESE SENATOR
23-01-1996 15:05:00 | Armenia | World News
TOKYO, Jan 22 (AFP) - North Korea is seeking additional
rice aid from Japan amid international efforts to coordinate an
approach to a food crisis in the hardline communist state, a
Japanese ruling coalition senator said Monday.
Akiko Domoto, who returned Saturday from a week-long tour of
North Korea, also told a coalition meeting that North Korean
officials had also offered to resume long-suspended talks with
Japan on normalisation of relations.
The senator from the New Party Sakigake, the smallest of the
three ruling parties, met Kim Yong-Sum, a secretary of the North
Korean Workers Party, during her stay in Pyongyang.
Japan agreed in October to send 200,000 tonnes of rice to North
Korea on top of a 300,000-tonne batch shipped between June and
September.
At the coalition meeting, Domoto quoted the North Korean side as
saying that the rice aid had been "distributed nationwide as an
expression of goodwill," according to coalition officials.
The new request for rice has come as Japan, the United States
and South Korea prepared to hold a meeting in Hawaii Wednesday
and Thursday and discuss a coordinated approach to the crisis in
the North where UN agencies say millions face starvation.
A team from the International Federation of Red Cross Societies
was on its way to Pyongyang to discuss launching a new appeal to
the international community to help ease the crisis brought on
AFP /AA1234/220904 GMT JAN 96