The NYT reports on the threat of famine in North Korea (via NK Zone):
To combat growing food shortages, the North Korean government is sending millions of city dwellers to work on farms each weekend, largely to transplant rice, according to foreign aid workers.
“The staff that work for us, the staff that work in the ministries, are going out to help farmers,” said Richard Ragan, director of World Food Program operations in Pyongyang, referring to North Koreans who work for the program. Speaking by telephone on Wednesday, he said that in terms of food supplies North Koreans “are inching back to the precipice.”
“It does happen every year,” he said of the mobilization of workers to the fields, “but the difference this year is that everyone is involved.”
Gerald Bourke, a World Food Program spokesman, said Wednesday that on a recent visit to the port of Wonsan, “We saw thousands of people who were marching out of the city.”
“Later, we saw them digging out irrigation canals,” he said, speaking by telephone from Beijing.
A decade ago, up to two million North Koreans starved to death in one of the rare peacetime famines of modern history. The famine was caused by a cutoff in Soviet aid, a collapse of North Korea’s industrial economy, and the reluctance of a highly xenophobic government to receive foreign aid.
Now, with worldwide opposition to Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program, foreign food aid is drying up…
The World Food Program, the largest foreign food supplier to North Korea, has received only 6 percent of the 230,000 tons it needs this year, Anthony Banbury, Asia director for the United Nations agency, told a news conference in Seoul last Friday, according to Reuters.
Referring to government rations, he said, “What the government is able to provide the people now, these 250 grams a day, is a starvation ration.”
For a discussion of the dilemma faced by aid agencies, knowing that vital humanitarian aid may prolong the life of a hideous regime and so bring more suffering in the long-term, see here.
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