Bleak Signs for North Korea’s Food Situation (Updated)
Original Post, 10 March 2010:
This week’s papers have several disturbing indicators suggesting that a sudden deterioration of the food situation is in the works. First was this report that even shops and hotels for foreigners in Pyongyang had run out of food; then, Robert linked to a report that kids can now seen begging even in Pyongyang.
Depending on what you choose to believe, however, this may not be an entirely new development. Our friend Christine Ahn, no less, reports seeing kids begging during a 2004 “solidarity” visit to Pyongyang.
“I went to North Korea as a peace activist. North Koreans were living in very difficult conditions. Eight-year-old children were loitering around the hotel, shaking because of hunger. Even soldiers were extremely thin.
From which she concludes:
One thing that surprised me was the mental strength of the North Koreans. I strongly felt their pride and urge to preserve their system.
So, Christine, you could feel the urge of starving eight-year-olds to preserve the system? Do tell! Still, I tend to think that a person who prefers to speak of North Korea’s “collective spirit” and complete absence of sexist billboards would not have mentioned the hungry kids unless she’d actually seen them. Ahn says the kids were “loitering.” To ask her to concede that they were most likely begging may be asking too much.
In other dreary news, at least one “leading” expert projects that North Korea’s grain production will continue to decline. Meanwhile, a regime crackdown on illegal border crossing has caused food prices to rise in North Korea.
The regime, for its part, thinks the answer to low food production is more state intervention, not less. It is offering financial incentives to party officials and their wives in Pyongyang to move to the countryside, something that would be tantamount to suicide for city folk unaccustomed to the hardships and privations of rural life.
Civic group North Korea Intellectuals Solidarity said the party held seminars at party chapters on Feb. 23 promising W10,000 in cash and 120 kg of food for households if they voluntarily move to farms.
The Workers’ Party recently distributed copies of a training manual for senior officials on fortifying rural bases. “To increase grain production the most important thing is to make up for a shortage in the rural workforce. This is why blue-collar workers and office workers in urban areas, senior officials in particular, should lead the vanguard in the campaign.” The regime is urging the wives of senior officials in the party and security agencies to set an example for others.
The regime is afraid of the possibility of mounting public discontent if it forces people to relocate at a time when they are seething in the wake of a disastrous currency reform. The regime is giving indoctrination classes to senior officials to move to rural areas and urging them to set an example, news media speculated.
But the group said such efforts would not be effective in persuading ordinary North Koreans to move to rural areas because living conditions there are very bad. “It’s very likely that the regime will end up forcibly relocating them,” it added.
The report goes on to predict that the regime won’t find many volunteers and will end up relocating people forcibly. But moving people from the top of the food chain to the bottom is a potential source of instability when it creates anxiety within the ruling class. This is a story worth watching.
Update, 12 March 2010: The Daily NK has more on the regime’s invitation to the elite to banish themselves to the countryside. The elite seem more interested in unloading their savings on expensive South Korean consumer goods before their money becomes worthless or gets confiscated.
Oh, FFS! It’s difficult getting my mind around the near psychotic divorce from reality which is necessarily to segue between these statements, but, as I don’t know about Ahn’s background, I’ll defer from calling her anything more than a muppet.
I ran out of sugar last week. It was terrible.
If you haven’t seen it already, Joshua, here’re reviews on Barbara Demick’s new book:
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/book_reviews/article7032653.ece
http://www.slate.com/id/2244182
And another which links the Junge religion to the Showa period:
http://www.economist.com/world/asia/displayStory.cfm?story_id=15579841
Ahn doesn’t get a lot of love here. I wonder if she ever stops by? One has to think that if she has even a little bit of intelligence she could come to the realization, based on events of the last couple of years if nothing else, that the “peace mongering” she has been preaching doesn’t really help the North Korean people to the extent it helps perpetuate the regime.
The name becomes flesh.
Maybe she also writes for George Orwell inspired organizations, just to hammer it home.
This itself is a race-based notion. Individual ethno-social groups, notably black Americans, definitely will be disadvantaged, but to group everyone either non-white/European as a homogenuous and aggrieved mass can only perpetuate division and foster entitlement.
A case in Britain was the recent conviction for perjury of Ali Dizaei, Iranian-born senior Police in London who ran his division like he was in Tehran. One of his wheezes was to have been the director of the Black Police Officers Association, when the only thing black about him was his hair-dye.
The concept of race is so vague. I don’t know about y’all, but I consider Persions white folks. They are archetypical Aryans.
I’m browner after a high summer than Dizaei, and I’m an ethnic teuchter. (Just like that other term for African-American spirituals as maybe referred to on The Wire, I can say the T-word… others can’t. Teuchter, teuchter, teuchter, teuchter.)
Even the popular use of Caucasian is based on the social Darwinism of the 19th Century, which saw Europeans (northern, usually) as hailing from one heroic tribe. I also (quite deliberately) cause confusion by reserving this label for Armenians or Georgians or Chechens.
I saw Joshua elsewhere suggest that the underlying biological racism in Juche (which, of course I know, is the term) might predispose the DPRK to tragetting Japanese and Australian beach-walkers rather than Koreans south of the 38th. Others will know better,but my impression is that it’s far too ill-formed for that – like the national socialism which the Showa descended into, it’s from a mish-mash of Buddhism and Shamanism and ancestor worship.
I also wonder if the likes of the odd-Protestant groups in the RoK and, even, Chaebols hails from the same soiurce.