By Ben Deighton and Jeremy Laurence
BRUSSELS/SEOUL (Reuters) - The European Commission said on Monday it would give 10 million euros (9 million pounds) of food aid to North Korea in the face of opposition from South Korea and U.S. doubts about the North's pleas for help.
The impoverished North has reached out to dozens of countries and organisations around the world for aid, complaining that bad weather, rising global food prices and the termination of aid from principle donors South Korea and the United States had slashed supplies.
The European Commission said it was convinced that the North's pleas for help were genuine after a team of experts reported seeing in June severely malnourished children in hospitals and nurseries where no treatment was available.
"The purpose of this aid package is to save the lives of at least 650,000 people who could otherwise die from lack of food," European Union Humanitarian Aid Commissioner Kristalina Georgieva said in a statement.
But critics of aid say the secretive North has siphoned off the food in the past to feed its million-strong army, and South Korea says the North's food stocks are at more or less the same levels as last year.
The EU's decision comes as Washington also weighs resuming food aid to the North, after suspending its shipments in 2008 in a monitoring row.
Analysts said any resumption of U.S. aid would annoy Seoul which is against sending food to its neighbour. Last Thursday, the United States said it was still assessing the results of its own trip to North Korea in May.
"We had been waiting to see who was going to move first on this," said Daniel Pinkston, an expert on Korean affairs in Seoul with the International Crisis Group.
"My sense is that there are so many other issues on the agenda in Washington ... and I think there's not much political will to provide aid and assistance.
"I don't see the Americans having a sudden change of heart, or that they will open the flood gates to food because the Europeans decided to."
HOARDING FOOD?
The United States and South Korea were by far the biggest food donors to the North, which suffers chronic food shortages, until 2008 when Washington suspended aid in a monitoring row with the North and Seoul linked aid to denuclearisation.
Since 1995, the United States has provided more than $1.2 billion in assistance to the North, about 60 percent of which has been food aid.
The U.S. Congress is divided between those who view aid as a political tool and those who view it as a humanitarian issue.
South Korea opposes giving food aid to its neighbour, saying its suspects Pyongyang may be trying to hoard food ahead of a third nuclear test, which would likely provoke a tightening of international sanctions.
Officials also say the North wants to stockpile food to give as presents to the people for next year's big celebrations to mark the centenary of the birth of the state's founder, Kim Il-sung.
South Korea's Unification Ministry, which overseeing policy on North Korea, repeated its opposition to food on Monday.
The relatively small European package targets children under 5 who have already been hospitalised with severe malnutrition.
Children in residential care will also be fed, as well as pregnant and breastfeeding women, hospital patients and the elderly, the Commission said.
More than 6 million people are in urgent need of outside assistance, according to a United Nations report issued in March.
The Commission said the aid would be strictly monitored from the point of delivery at the ports to recipients.
"If at any stage we discover that the aid is being diverted from its intended recipients then the Commission will not hesitate to end its humanitarian intervention," said Georgieva.
(Additional reporting by Robert-Jan Bartunek; Editing by Alastair Macdonald and Robert Birsel)
