Why bother micromanaging when you don’t have to oversee anything at all? Compare 2007:

When natural hazards like floods occur in North Korea, the South Korean government sends “humanitarian assistance.” But it has turned out that the government failed to monitor whether the emergency relief aid was being used appropriately.

The government spent 221 billion won (229 million dollars) from August last year to June this year to help North Korea repair damage from last July’s flood. But the Ministry of Unification said on July 10 that the after-monitoring of its use has not yet started.

[…]

The items that the government sent to Pyongyang via the Korean Red Cross include: 100,000 tons of rice, 100,000 tons of cement, 5,000 tons of iron reinforcing rods, 210 relief machines, 80,000 blankets, 10,000 emergency kits, and medicines.

To 2005:

North Korea has said it will no longer accept food aid from the international community and has demanded that the UN World Food Program shut its Pyongyang office and withdraw its monitors.

[…]

It appears that a country where every grain of rice is precious is turning up its nose at international aid because the scale of aid is growing smaller even as monitoring has grown stricter. At the same time, South Korean aid to the North has increased from 400,000 tons last year to 500,000 tons, but monitoring by Seoul is a mere formality. Pyongyang would thus much rather depend on the South than on the pesky international community.

The WFP, under the principle of “No Access, No Food,” mobilized some 100 staff and carried out 4,800 on-the-spot inspections last year, while South Korea carried out a grand total of 10. WFP agents even visit North Korean families, while the South Korean officials who go to the North bringing food will, at most, listen to what the officials in charge of food distribution centers have to say.

This being the case, it is only natural that U.S. Korea expert Marcus Noland recently pointed out that South Korea’s and China’s unconditional food aid to the North harms the food distribution transparency international bodies have built up over the last 10 years.