Food Shortages Widen N. Korea’s Class Gap
[Update: For some reason, the links to those Good Friends reports are finicky. Try this:
Two more dispatches from Good Friends reinforce previous reports that as the food crisis intensifies, it’s kids and for the elderly especially hard. Things only seem to be getting worse. You have to question the precision and timeliness of anecdotes and direct quotations smuggled out of North Korea, but I quote them here nonetheless. Read and decide for yourself.
Among 2 million residents in Pyongyang, there are few who are trading or are qualified to trade. There are few who can go outside the city and forage for herbs to eat. There is not much work available in the city, but yet they can’t leave the city to search for alternative food sources because they are always being summoned for labor. Even if they work, it is hard to actually get paid for their work, and when they do it is never enough to buy food due to the increase in food prices. The average wage is about 2,000 won, but this is nearly not enough to buy oil, salt, soy sauce, or to pay utilities or their children’s tuition. In the city, it is not like other areas where people are trading for food or getting herbs from the mountains. Therefore, they are forced to rely on the national food distribution, which has not been reliable.
However, people who live downtown or people who are high officials in the Party have no concerns regarding food shortages. Moreover, there are people who are profiting from the food shortage by going back and forth abroad and engaging in illegal trading. These people are able to increase their wealth in the face of starvation for their countrymen. Kim Hye-kyoung (45) criticizes the current phenomena: “These people who are profiting can even buy health supplements because they obviously don’t have problem meeting their basic needs. Young pretty girls are seeking to date these people to make their living. Thus, it causes domestic disputes. The agriculture in this nation is deteriorating every year, and the families are being corrupted in this way. People are starting to doubt how long this society will sustain.” [Good Friends, newsletter-number-133.pdf]
Grandfather Han says, with tears glistening in his eyes, “perhaps I didn’t build up enough good karma in my previous lifetime or our ancestors are buried in the wrong location, I just don’t know why all my children are suffering like this.” [….] “I have lived as well as I could. I don’t know how our country became like this.”
He shakes his head, “I don’t what our ancestors did to bring down such a fate to our country and people. We suffered under the Japanese for half a century. Then we have been separated for another half a century. How upsetting and sad! When we all risked our lives for the revolution, wasn’t it so that we could all live well? The current state of Chosun is so pathetic. Is socialism to drill into our heads that we have to sacrifice everything for the Great Leader and that dying for him is a high honor, while not caring about how the people on the ground actually live and suffer? Just how many people do you still think there are who believe in the Party anymore? The socialism that I dreamt of when I was young was not this.” Han then took his wrinkled hand and quietly wiped away a tear. [Good Friends, newsletter-number-134.pdf]
There is other evidence to suggest that the needs of the elite in Pyongyang are still being met, and then some. Against a backdrop of famine everywhere else, downtown Pyongyang decided to throw an “international trade fair.” The buyers consisted of a razor-thin slice from the top tier of North Korea’s class system, and both the i-pods on sale and some of the dollars used to buy them were said to be counterfeit (paging Kevin Hall!). Someone bought — or appeared to buy — fifteen $1,200 refrigerators, although you have to wonder how anyone could fill or power them. I never take any event in North Korea where foreigners are present at face value, although I don’t quite get what point the regime could be trying to make in times like these.
Related:
* NGO’s, including Good Friends, are calling on South Korean president Lee Myung Bak to provide food aid to North Korea notwithstanding the North’s continued restrictions on monitoring and distribution of that aid. Just once, I’d like to see some South Korean NGO’s call on the North to cease their corrupt and discriminatory system of distribution, their obsessively controlling restrictions on monitoring, and of course, their squandering of the nation’s resources on weapons and grandiose projects during a famine.
* The regime mobilizes the army to plant crops, apparently at the expense of this year’s training cycle. The Daily NK explains why this year’s mobilization goes beyond what is customary:
However, a source from North Korea released a different prediction from it in an telephone interview with the Daily NK, saying that “It is true that the People’s Army rushes into a preparatory training for the Summer Military Drill in May and June every year, but it is also a custom forof the army to be massively mobilized in a mass into the “˜Spring Rice-planting Battle’ in May.
The source explained that “The authorities drive students and, workers as well as the army into the Spring Rice-planting Battle. Although the People’s Army will beshould concentratinge on the farming supporting activitiesy, the core of the military strength ““ such as the artillery corps, the navy and the air force ““ is not supposed to support farming.
The People’s Army was generallyhas been conducting a generaln inspection over its the defense readiness conditionsituation in May and June. It iswas known that North Korea is carrying out the two typimes of military drills: the summer drill is for an “onsite blow (attack)” and the winter drill, from December to February, is for a “defense drill. [Daily NK]