World Food Program (WFP) Executive Director James Morris is scheduled to visit North Korea next week to discuss future food aid to the impoverished Stalinist state.

According to Radio Free Asia Thursday, Morris will make a two-day trip to Pyongyang from Tuesday to try to reach an agreement on wide differences between the North and the U.N. food agency on Pyongyang’s insistence that foreign aid groups shift from humanitarian to development-related work in the communist state and curtail local operations.

Earlier in August, Pyongyang asked the WFP to end its food aid by year's end, saying it had enough food and did not want to remain dependent on foriegn assistance.

In October, the WFP and North Korean officials met in Rome to discuss the future of food aid to the country. The discussions ended without an agreement as Pyongyang reportedly raised issue with the U.N. body's "intrusive" methods of monitoring the aid distribution and disagreed over the number of foreign staff, the size of the program and operational means.

The WFP, on its part, wants to discuss the switch from food to developmental aid and keep its presence in the North.

The WFP has distributed since 1995 about four million tons of food in North Korea, which suffered serious famines in the 1990s.