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North Koreans: Still hungry. Who cares?
By Aidan Foster-Carter
Warning: This article is really boring. And ever so depressing. There's lots far more exciting than this at Asia Times Online. Why not go read something else instead? ATol's excellent Korean page is full of sexy stuff: tensions, missiles, conflict. All true, too. Anxious times.
Whereas my tale isn't even news - or rather, the news has been the same for years. I'll give away the punchline right now, upfront. North Koreans are hungry. Old story. Yawn, yawn. I've written here in this vein before, all of eight years ago. [1] Apologies if I repeat myself.
In Kim Jong-il's realm of misery, nothing gets better. You knew
that. But now, some things - the most basic thing of all: having enough to eat - are actively and urgently getting worse.
Who says? The government, for a start. With no sense of contradiction or public relations, North Korea is simultaneously rattling the sabre and the begging bowl. Even as Pyongyang threatens to turn Seoul into a sea of fire, and to gun down Southern activists - many in fact refugees from the North - who launch propaganda balloons across the border, its envoys around the world are demanding that we should feed them. Obviously Kim Jong-il isn't up to the job. The United States and the United Kingdom both confirm that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) has recently asked them directly for food aid.
Is your first instinct to trust the Kim regime? Me neither. Skeptics mutter that the North isn't really short of food. But they need to build up a stockpile, so a year hence they can throw a convincing party for the centenary of Great Leader Kim Il-sung: still president, though dead since 1994. Look, rice! And this is called meat! Bow and be grateful, you lucky peasants.
In a slogan that sounds a real hostage to fortune, April 2012 is the official target date for the DPRK to become a "great and prosperous nation" (kangsong taeguk). Won't that backfire, like the emperor's new clothes? Comrade, we're rich now! So how come I can see your ribs?
Skepticism is one thing, cynicism another. I don't trust Pyongyang, but I do trust Christian Friends of Korea (CFK). Southern Baptists: what image does that conjure up? Right-wing, preaching hellfire? Not the ones I know. CFK feeds the hungry and heals the sick - in North Korea. They've been going in and out since 1995, raising US$42 million to date for food and medical aid, especially for tuberculosis. But don't believe me; read more at www.cfk.org, or a new paper from the Korea Economic Institute (KEI) about their and others' work on TB. [2]
Nor is CFK alone. Eugene Bell does similar work, as do several other US non-governmental organizations (NGOs) such as Global Resource Services, Mercy Corps, Samaritan's Purse and World Vision. Last month, those four and CFK sent a team of seven experts - all with in-country experience; two are Korean-speakers - to assess current food needs in North Korea. They were there for a week, visiting 45 sites - hospitals, orphanages, ordinary homes, cooperative farms, warehouses - in 17 counties and cities in three provinces in the northwest. Access was excellent: they could and did ask to visit places on the day, rather than an itinerary pre-planned by North Korea.
It's not looking good. It never does, but right now it's getting worse. Nature has dealt North Korea a double whammy. Last summer brought heavy rains and flooding, which hit staple grains (maize and rice) and saw the vegetable crop cut by half in some areas. The harvested grain in granaries was further damaged by humidity.
Then came winter: always bitter, but this was the worst in 66 years. The latest newsletter (no 390) [3] from the well-informed South Korean Buddhist NGO Good Friends is a grim litany of people freezing to death. Most vulnerable are the kkotjebis: literally "flower swallows", far too pretty a name for these sad bands of ragged orphans who survive if at all on their wits:
It is impossible to avoid bone-penetrating hunger even though they were successful begging … Some lucky children wrapped themselves up with vinyl, most of them shakes terribly only with torn rag. It is painfully pitiful to see the blackened bony body covered in dirt. Many children have pneumonia symptoms and there are no children without frostbite due to the torturous starvation and cold.
But back to food, lack of. The big freeze killed half the spring wheat and barley, which would have softened last summer's blow. A 2 million tonne gap between supply and demand leaves three options: buy food abroad, get aid, or starve. In the past Pyongyang has cut food imports when it got aid, which doesn't exactly encourage donors. The US team were told the government had planned to buy 325,000 tonnes of food this year, but with prices soaring this has been cut to 200,000 tonnes. Only 40,000 tonnes has actually been purchased so far.
Already, rations under the Public Distribution System (PDS) have been cut to a meagre 400 grams daily. That only gives 61% of the minimum calories, 58% of protein, 51% of vitamin A and 32% of the iron a body needs. It's not clear how many people even get this. The PDS collapsed during the 1996-98 famine, and has never fully recovered since. In today's North Korea, Juche (self-reliance) carries an ominous new sub-text: You're on your own, mate.
The effects are already showing up. Most vulnerable, as always, are the chronically sick, the elderly, households with few earners, pregnant or lactating women - and small children, the under-fives. Smaller than they should be. The US visitors saw children suffering from acute malnutrition, as well as stunting, wasting, and listlessness from hunger. Stunting and wasting - that means low height for age, and low weight for height - are already endemic: in 2009 the rates were 32% and 6% respectively. That means almost one in three children is stunted.
Remember the movie Honey, I Shrunk the Kids? Well, the not visibly underfed Kim Jong-il did it for real - and marked them for life. A study in South Korea of 103 young defectors found them on average 5-11 centimeters shorter and 6-10 kilograms lighter than their Southern peers. [4]
So what are we going to do? That's we as in you and I. You may feel the only real cure is for the Dear Leader to go the way of Egypt's Hosni Mubarak and (hopefully) Libya's Muammar Gaddafi. Sure, the regime is the problem. But children are children. They didn't ask to be born North Korean. Their plight is not their fault. As former US president Ronald Reagan (no less) once said, "A hungry child knows no politics."
Also in North Korea is a mission from the United Nations World Food Program (WFP); it will report in late March. Depending what this finds, the US and other governments might cough up; but I wonder. Everyone is just utterly fed up with North Korea. The US envoy on human rights, Robert King, said in Seoul on February 11: "It's hard to give food to Pyongyang."
He's right. The Kim regime doesn't just flaunt a new nuclear facility and attack the South. It also bites the hand that tries to feed it. WFP, whose DPRK operation was once its largest on the planet, was brusquely ordered out in 2005, along with all the resident foreign NGOs that has been helping the DPRK for a decade. Eventually WFP was permitted a greatly reduced footprint, feeding just 1.9 million North Koreans: barely a quarter of the peak of 6.5 million.
Despite severe flooding in 2007 and fresh fears of famine in 2008, WFP was not allowed to resume a larger presence - until May 2008. Food aid should be a politics-free zone, but for the George W Bush administration in its dying months to give North Korea half a million tons of grain was patently a reward for what looked like progress on the nuclear front. Most of this (80%) was to be distributed by WFP, the rest via five US NGOs: the same ones that just visited.
But this too went pear-shaped. In 2009 the US quintet were kicked out before the program was finished, as the DPRK's missile and nuclear tests caused political relations to plummet again. The fact that these NGOs have just gone back shows a graciousness sorely lacking in Pyongyang. They freely admit there is no guarantee they won't get messed around again.
There are some positives. In 2008-09 Korean speakers (a problem in the past) were allowed. And monitoring, often a bugbear, was excellent. In just nine months the NGOs made 1,600 monitoring visits - at all stages, from unloading in port to provincial and county warehouses, recipient institutions, and right down to individual households - to ensure the food really did reach almost a million people in the northwestern Chagang and North Pyongan provinces.
But above all, the need is still there and getting ever more desperate. Spring means a blessed end to winter - but it is also the classic lean season of hunger, which if unchecked will last through summer all the way until the next autumn harvest: itself unpredictable.
Plenty, maybe most, will walk away. The world is full of need - and most of the needy have better manners than the DPRK government. Should we starve them into submission, then?
Trouble is, the "them" who need to change their ways are not the them that are hungry. If North Korea interests you - and if it doesn't, then why are you reading this? - then please, care too. Don't harden your heart. Leave that to the Kim regime.
This article names seven NGOs working in North Korea. You can find their websites easily enough. There are more, plus UN and other international bodies: WFP, Red Cross (IFRC) et al. All are under-funded. They, and North Korea's children, need you. Right now. Please.
Notes
1. An appeal for North Korea's children, December 24, 2002.
2. Click here.
3. Click here or specifically here.
4. You can read it here.
Aidan Foster-Carter is honorary senior research fellow in sociology and modern Korea at Leeds University, and a freelance consultant, writer and broadcaster on Korean affairs. A regular visitor to the peninsula, he has followed North Korea for over 40 years.
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