Mrs. Robinson echoed Mr. Carter’s concerns about what she called the “very serious crisis” over food supplies in North Korea because of a harsh winter, severe flooding and an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease. She said the withdrawal of American and South Korean food shipments had aggravated a dire situation, which had become, she said, “a matter of life-and-death urgency.”

The United States recently sent a team of experts to evaluate food and hunger conditions in North Korea. But the Obama administration has not yet decided about a resumption of food shipments.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said recently that “North Korea must address our serious concerns about monitoring.” Integral to any agreement to restart American aid deliveries, she said, would be “our ability to ensure and monitor that whatever food aid is provided actually reaches the people who are in need.”

After his trip in April, Mr. Carter said North Korean officials had guaranteed to make changes to the aid-distribution system so that Western governments and donors could track their deliveries and be certain that their aid was not being diverted to the military or the ruling elite.

The European aid will be distributed through the World Food Program, which has been used by the United States and other countries and donors. Ms. Georgieva said it would be strictly monitored, from the point of delivery at ports to when it reached 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,” she said.

According to the European Commission, its experts found that in North Korea the state-distributed food rations had been more than halved in recent months. Two-thirds of the population depends on the rations, it said.