The Famine of 2008 Has Begun: “It seems like everyone is going to die.”

Those are the grim words of a North Korean interviewed in Good Friends’s latest newsletter, which reports that North Koreans — not just the usual concentration camp inmates and street orphans, but farmers  — are now dying of starvation because of the current food crisis:

In the farming areas of the township of Yangduk, Yangduk County and the vicinity in South Pyongan Province , instances of people dying by starvation due to a shortage of food rations are appearing. Currently, there are many individuals who have been so weakened by the lack of food that they are unable to move their bodies, and one or two deaths are transpiring in each village due to starvation. The Yangduk County Party has stressed the fact that more deaths by starvation will take place if emergency food rations are not supplied, but has not been able to take actions beyond that. Officials in the County party and the farmsare doing nothing more than intensifying ideological education and saying, ‘All of us are facing difficult times, so let’s tighten our belts and solve this problem. Everyone report to work.’ Farmer Han Kyung-duk (56) appealed, ‘Please give us something to eat. If you do that, we will report to work even if you tell us not to. We need to eat something in order to have the strength to work.’   [Good Friends]

And a happy May Day to all.

Good Friends’s full update — here’s a link — contains an interesting map of the hardest-hit areas, one of which happens to be that beacon of trickle-down enrichment of the masses, Kaesong.  So much for that experiment.  Admittedly, coincidence isn’t causation, but it damn well isn’t prevention, either.  So the people of Kaesong, instead of eating ChocoPies, shrimp chips,  and pre-packaged  chapagetti, are eating noodles made from grass and cornstalks.  Out of North Korea’s 8 million farm workers, Good Friends reports that 2 million are surviving on grass porridge, which reduces the pain of starvation but has little nutritional value.  It won’t keep you alive, and it  can wreck your digestive tract.

Since the last report, the price of rice has simply skyrocketed.  It’s now at over 3,000 won per kilogram, double what it was in mid-March and triple what it was at the beginning of the year.  At AEI the other day, Marcus Noland showed us  this chart:

[Marcus Noland, Peterson Institute]

Good Friends offers this one:

Is Ban Ki Moon too occupied with checking himself for rectal polyps  to demand that the World Food Program get access to these places, to conduct a needs assessments, and to deliver emergency aid?  And for that matter, where is President Bush?  Neither the U.N. nor the U.S. government, the two  organizations in the best position to organize a humanitarian response and insist on the sort of transparency  that’s essential  to really avert famine, seem either to have  no clear idea of what to do or no idea of the situation’s urgency. 

Now is last chance time.