The U.N. World Food Program has ended all food assistance in North Korea at Pyongyang's request.

Richard Ragan, the director of the WFP Pyongyang branch, told the New York Times Saturday in Beijing that the North since last fall had pressed for reduced operations, thus the agency fed only 600,000 people in December and shut down operations on January 1st.

He said the agency also closed five offices outside Pyongyang and 19 food processing plants in the North and nearly halved its foreign staff to about 25.

The WFP has spent 1.7 billion dollars over the last decade to feed North Koreans and was the food source for a third of the North's 22 million people in August.