N. Korea Food Crisis Updates

Good Friends was our early warning system. Now that the famine has begun, the U.N. is sounding an alarm.

North Korea is heading toward its worst food crisis since the 1990s because of flooding, successive crop failures and worldwide inflation for staples such as rice and corn, the United Nations World Food Program said Wednesday.

The agency shied away from predicting another famine like the one that killed as many as 2 million people in the 1990s, but said its field staff was observing some of the same warning signs.

People are again foraging for wild plants, grass and seaweed to supplement their meager diets. Hospitals are reporting an increase in chronic diarrhea and illness that are often linked to malnutrition. Many families have cut back from three meals a day to two. [….]

Under North Korea’s communist system, people living in the cities rely on a public distribution system for their staples, but the rations have been cut to one-third of their original levels. At the same time, their purchasing power has been eroded by inflation.

“We’ve noticed that market prices for staple foods in Pyongyang — rice, maize, potatoes, eggs — were all going through the roof, sometimes quadrupling,” De Margerie said. [L.A. Times, Barbara Demick]

North Korea may be facing its worst food shortages in decades, an official with the World Food Program predicted. [….] “Millions of vulnerable North Koreans are at risk of slipping toward precarious hunger levels,” he said. “We are running against the clock here.” [UPI]

Although it’s difficult to say just how many have died so far this year, the Ven. Pomnyun’s predictions that up to 300,000 would die this summer were probably overstated. Food prices appear to have fallen from their peak levels in May, but only to levels that most still can’t afford. Nor would it be accurate to say that prices have stabilized. The famine this year probably isn’t what it was in the mid-1990’s, but those years probably built upon years of pre-harvesting, depletion of stores, depletion of wild plants, reduced rations, and bad harvests.

Heavy rains that battered North Korea in recent weeks have heavily damaged crops, state media said Monday, dealing a further blow to the impoverished country as it struggles to avert a food crisis. Strong downpours pounded many parts of North Korea between Friday and Sunday, including Kangwon province, which received 12.7 inches of rain, the official Korean Central News Agency reported. The harsh weather came a week after similar rains lashed the country, it said. [USA Today]

A second shipment of American food aid has arrived to help feed ~~the needy~~ the army. And what is North Korea doing to help its own people? This headline should give you some idea:

“North Korea to launch mass festival despite food crisis”

Is there more? There always is. They have their priorities, after all.

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