Category: Famine & Food Aid

North Korean food exports to China have increased by more than 35 percent compared to the same period last year, and are at their highest levels in at least four years, according to Chinese customs data. [….] [I]n the first eight months of the year, North Korea exported more food than it received in food aid in the whole of 2011 according to a recent World Food Program (WFP) report. [NK News, Leo Byrne] And this, shortly after the regime...

Apparently, 2014 will be the 21st consecutive year in which a drought or a flood will have devastated crops and caused food shortages in only the northern part of the Korean Peninsula. Simply uncanny how that keeps happening like that. North Korea’s food distribution to ordinary citizens tumbled to a three-year low in August, hit by a drought in the spring, a U.S. report said Wednesday. The North’s daily food ration per capita reached 250 grams last month, far lower...

known as kkotjaebi.

There are compelling arguments from defectors that suggest it’s time to cut loose, no matter how Machiavellian that may seem. The growing suspicion is that food aid inhibits the population’s ability for self-determinism and profligates the regime’s control. In other words, while we pump $200,000,000 of food aid into the country, Kim Jong-un can spend the national budget on 4-D cinemas, water parks and, you guessed it, nuclear armament (though, that, too, is unfounded hearsay—the kind of scaremongering required to...

here, via the snaggletoothed, rheumy-eyed old Trotskyites at The Guardian. I’m not sure how representative the sample is, but it’s a much more skeptical sample than we’d have seen even five years ago. At some point, you have to question why, after a decade of aid, more than 80% of the citizens of an industrialized nation with plenty of cash laying around can still be living hand-to-mouth. Clearly, the U.N. isn’t addressing the root cause of hunger in North Korea...

The Wall Street Journal reports that the World Food Program may soon suspend operations in North Korea due to a lack of funding. The program’s internal reports claim that as of late 2013, it was feeding just 1.45 million North Koreans, compared to 2.4 million intended recipients, mostly pregnant women, nursing mothers, and children. Most of what is distributed now consists of materiel like high-energy biscuits, which (thankfully) are not easily digested by healthy people and thus not easily diverted. But as the U.N....

Last year, after two decades of almost interrupted crop failures, North Korea experienced its first good harvest since at least 2005, and possibly since 1992. Unfortunately, it looks like North Korea is regressing to the norm again, with KCNA claiming that North Korea is experiencing “its worst spring drought in more than three decades.” It’s seldom wise to accept KCNA’s claims at face value, but even if one does, it’s worth remembering that none of the floods and droughts that...

My friend, Andrei Lankov, is again proclaiming that North Korea has reformed its agricultural sector, which he credits for last year’s improved harvest. I’ve grown comfortable with my pessimism about reform in North Korea, because events have never failed to vindicate it. Regrettably, nothing in my friend’s report dissuades me from adherence to my default view. First, Lankov claims that these reforms have resulted in a 30% increase in last year’s harvest; however, the most reliable data we have show...

In North Korea, malnutrition remains widespread, crops are being seized in the provinces, women are selling their bodies to survive, NGOs say the country is in a state of humanitarian crisis, and a staggering 84% of households still can’t get enough to eat. So what else is new? The U.N. says North Korea has just had its best harvest in years. North Korea is still struggling with chronic malnutrition with 84 percent of households having borderline or poor food consumption, United Nations agencies said on Thursday,...