A Catastrophe Unfolds

Disturbing reports of a dramatically worsening famine continue to filter out of North Korea, notwithstanding the regime’s Maoist mobilization of schoolchildren and office workers to the countryside. It’s not working, according to South Korean agricultural expert Kang Jong-Man, via the L.A. Times:

The rice paddies are thin and uneven. Potato plants are pale and stunted. The fields are not properly graded. Barley still on the stalks should have been harvested weeks ago so that the same fields could be used for rice.

There are hardly any tractors in sight, only oxen — and even they appear too small and weak to properly till the land.

“You need capital and a budget to have a decent field. You need to maintain your soil. The North Koreans clearly haven’t done any of that. The crop will not be worth all the manpower they’re putting into it,” Kang said.

Under the best of circumstances, this is a traditionally lean month in North Korea because by now the previous year’s harvest of staples — rice and corn — has been used up and the new crop won’t start coming in until August.

But this year, food seems to be in especially short supply, said people working and living inside the country.

“The North Koreans don’t like to say anything is wrong”¦. But I get the sense that they are having big problems with food this year and it is getting worse,” said Yang Yung Min, a South Korean executive who has lived for nearly two years near Mt. Kumgang working with Hyundai Asan Corp., the firm that runs the tours to the region.

In the typically secretive style of the North Korean government, nothing has been said publicly about a food shortage. But the World Food Program office in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, recently conducted a series of focus groups with families, who complained about sharply rising food prices. Economic restructuring implemented in 2002 compels families to purchase much of their food on the open market, but prices for rice and corn have tripled in the last year, said Richard Ragan, the WFP director for North Korea.

“What people are saying to us is that food production last year might not have been as high as everybody thought,” Ragan said in a telephone interview from Pyongyang.

“We are observing as well that there seems to be a lot less livestock around and less cereal to feed the livestock,” he said.

Read on to see that some are saying that the regime is (surprise) hoarding food for itself in the event of sanctions. Meanwhile, the same reporter (Barbara Demick) has been interviewing refugees to find out about life in Chongjin, near the Chinese border:

His day begins at 4:30 a.m. The 64-year-old retired math teacher doesn’t own a clock or even a watch, but the internal alarm that has kept him alive while so many of his fellow North Koreans have starved to death tells him he had better get out to pick grass if his family is to survive.

Soon the streets of his city, Chongjin, will be swarming with others doing the same. Some cook the grass to eat. The teacher feeds it to the rabbits his family sells at the market.

At 10 a.m., he eats a modest meal of corn porridge. A late breakfast is best as it allows him and his wife to skip lunch. Then he goes with a hand cart to collect firewood. He has to walk two hours from Chongjin, mostly uphill, to find a patch that has not been stripped bare of vegetation.

“There is no time for rest. If you stand still, you will not survive,” said the teacher, a lean, soft-spoken man with salt-and-pepper hair who could be described as elegant if not for his threadbare trousers and his fingernails, as gnarled as oyster shells from chronic malnutrition.

Later, if it is one of the rare evenings when there is electricity, he might indulge in reading Tolstoy. More often than not, he collapses for a few hours of sleep before the routine is replayed for yet another day.

. . . .
Even with international aid, many people go to bed wondering whether they will eat the next day. Residents, along with officials of the United Nations World Food Program, say food shortages have grown worse again in the last year.

“Maybe people are not dying today out in the streets like they were before,” said a coal miner who lives in Chongjin, “but they are still dying — just quietly in their homes.”

The prolonged hardship has left North Koreans increasingly disillusioned with leader Kim Jong Il and the ideology of national self-reliance that once held the nation together. People say the regime has less and less control.

With corruption running rampant, the state is no longer solely in charge of commerce. People hustle to sell anything they can — prohibited videos of South Korean soap operas, real estate and official travel documents. In this free-for-all, some people have prospered. Many more are just a step ahead of starvation.

Recently, many bloggers attacked Ms. Demick for her interview of a North Korean trade official, accusing her of being insufficiently cognizant of the human rights issue. It may be time to reconsider. Both reports are must-reads.

Note that Chongjin is something of a hotbed of anti-government sentiment and has been given less food than other regions. That makes it a prime candidate to become North Korea’s first “liberated zone.” As for the “international community,” except some quiet hand-wringing, but nothing that would publicly challenge the Chinese or North Korean governments to get food into the bellies of these people. The international community has failed, as in the 1990s, and as in Darfur, Srebrenica, Rwanda, and Somalia before.

If our government cannot assure that the food will go those who need it, then it is time to arm the North Korean people so that they can seize control of their own granaries and farms.

Photo credit: BBC, via the AP. Citizens of Chongjin line up for food at a Public Distribution System supply point. International food aid is channeled through the PDS, which the regime manipulates as a political tool to favor certain classes over others..