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Category: Famine & Food Aid

October 6, 2015

How one wafer-thin mint could reform North Korea

I’ll put it this way: if you were Kim Jong Un’s doctor, would you tell him to cut back on the $300-a-bottle champagne, Kobe beef, and shark’s fin soup? If you were his cook, would you want to tell him he can’t have his midnight snack? Would you want to be the one to notice that he’s gained some weight? I mean, what’s the worst that could happen? North Korean leader Kim Jong-un gained around 30 kg over the last...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/Kim Jong Un
September 30, 2015

Kim Jong-Un’s party yachts aren’t just a joke. They’re a crime.

Starting at Paragraph 493 of its landmark report, a U.N. Commission of Inquiry extensively documented Pyongyang’s denial of the right of its citizens to food, both during and since the Great Famine killed at least hundreds of thousands of people, and possibly millions, in the 1990s. Although there have been reports of microfamines in North Korea as recently as 2012, for the most part, the story of North Korea’s food crisis for the last decade and a half has been one of gross...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/Kim Jong Un
August 5, 2015

Famine, food policy, and the lost lessons of history

A drought, exacerbated by disastrous agricultural policies, causes widespread famine. A divided Congress, unsure about feeding an enemy, reluctantly agrees to send aid. A paranoid, totalitarian government obstructs the delivery of the aid, infiltrates and spies on aid organizations, and diverts food from starving children to a loyal elite. Desperate victims resort to cannibalism. Back in America, politics continues to intrude — the hard right wants to starve a Marxist-Leninist government into submission, while the hard left sympathizes with the regime and accuses...

Categories Famine & Food Aid
July 22, 2015

U.N. must confront the political causes of North Korea’s food crisis

In North Korea, the land of suspended disbelief, an almost unbroken twenty-year series of meteorological miracles has bounded droughts and floods within the blighted land between the DMZ and the Yalu River each year, without having once caused a famine or food crisis in South Korea. For a few months this year, a serious drought threatened to be the worst-ever again, until rains came and eased conditions in most parts of the country. North Koreans can still look forward to a hard year...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/Resistance
July 21, 2015

“The first words she said were, ‘let’s die together.’ But I was still happy.”

National Geographic recounts the story of Eunsun Kim, who survived the Great Famine and a dangerous journey from North Korea to the South: Many people died because of malnutrition, including my grandparents. In 1997, my father passed away too. My mom sold or bartered everything from our apartment until we had nothing left. So she decided to go to the city to search for food. She left me at home, but took my older sister who’s two-years-older than me. She said...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/Human Trafficking/Refugees
June 3, 2015

Markets, food, and trade: steps forward, leaps backward (Pts. 1, 2 & 3)

~   Part 1   ~ Do you still remember March, when the “May 30 measures” were the next wave of “drastic” perestroika that would change North Korea? Those measures were supposed to “give[] autonomy management of all institutions, companies, and stores,” including “control over production distribution and trade from the state to factories and businesses,” and thus awaken “the inner potential of the country.” But today, Andrei Lankov, who has been one of the most forward-leaning predictors of economic reform...

Categories Capitalism/Famine & Food Aid
April 15, 2015

Why does North Korea still need food aid? (Updated)

The UN aid agencies working in North Korea — the Food and Agriculture Organization, the UN Population Fund, UNICEF, the World Food Program, and WHO (writing collectively as Relief Web) — have published a new report. I draw three main conclusions from it. First, despite some reports of improved food production, the humanitarian situation is still bad. Second, aid agencies still aren’t being forthcoming about the most important reasons for that. Third, various UN entities are working at cross purposes, and don’t...

Categories "United" Nations/Famine & Food Aid/Sanctions
April 9, 2015

Would Christine Ahn please ask Pyongyang to stop deporting the nice aid workers? For the children?

North Korea has deported U.S. citizen Sandra Suh, a humanitarian aid worker and founder of the L.A.-based NGO Wheat Mission Ministries, who had been working in North Korea since 1998. Pyongyang accused Suh of “plot-breeding and propaganda” — specifically, by showing “propaganda abroad with photos and videos” that she “secretly produced and directed, out of inveterate repugnancy” toward the North, “under the pretense of ‘humanitarianism.’” The North Korean news agency said Suh had “admitted her acts … seriously insulted the absolute trust” North Koreans place in their...

Categories AP Watch/Famine & Food Aid/Useful Idiocy
April 6, 2015

Welthungerhilfe should tell us why N. Korea expelled its country director

North Korea has expelled Regina Feindt, the Country Director for the German humanitarian NGO Welthungerhilfe, which has operated in North Korea since 1997, “[w]ithout warning or saying why.” Reuters describes Welthungerhilfe as “one of the few foreign aid groups to operate in the isolated country.” Welthungerhilfe is not simply accepting this result quietly: Feindt’s colleague Karl Fall, who had worked in the country for 12 years, left of his own volition the next month, it said. “Welthungerhilfe does not see...

Categories Famine & Food Aid
February 26, 2015

UN POE Report: North Korean spies infiltrated UNESCO, World Food Program

I’ll just let you read what the POE’s draft report says for yourself: Well, that might explain a few things. For those who don’t know, the Reconnaissance General Bureau handles most of North Korea’s clandestine foreign intelligence work. It is sanctioned by the Treasury Department. It is suspected of being behind the Rangoon Bombing in 1983, KAL 858 bombing in 1987, a series of attempted and completed assassinations of activists and defectors, and the Sony hack and threats. RGB agents may have also crewed the...

Categories "United" Nations/Famine & Food Aid
February 19, 2015

More food for hungry North Koreans is not “bad news” for sanctions proponents.

I don’t always agree with Scott Snyder’s views, but I’ve always enjoyed reading his work. In almost every case, I’ve found it to be well-researched and objective. In a blog post for the Council on Foreign Relations, Snyder cautiously concludes that North’s cereal production is “stable and improving” — from 5.93 million tons last year to 5.94 million tons this year, a more generous characterization than the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization report he cites, which calls North Korea’s food production “stagnant.”...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/Sanctions
January 29, 2015

How much do we still care about ag reform in North Korea?

If one mark of a good reporter is that you can’t tell how he really feels about his subject matter, then I haven’t much to say for Yonhap reporter Chang Jae-Soon, who cites a post at 38 North by Randall Ireson to declare that North Korean agricultural reforms are working. That’s a daring declaration for anyone to offer in the barren dead of January after so many more optimistic analyses have come to nothing, including those of Randall Ireson. That may be...

Categories Famine & Food Aid
January 7, 2015

Dear Professor Lankov: Shall we make it double or nothing?

As he did in 2012, Andrei Lankov has gone all-in supporting the latest rumors of economic and agricultural reforms in North Korea, calling them “revolutionary.” The Wall Street Journal’s excellent Alastair Gale describes Lankov’s prediction, notes the skepticism of the South Korean government, and notes that Lankov is “not often associated with very bullish views on North Korean reform.” The plan, he says, citing recent visitors to the country, would give more freedom and land to the country’s farmers. North...

Categories Famine & Food Aid
November 12, 2014

World Food Program won’t quit N. Korea, yet

“We are no longer in danger of closing our operations in DPRK at the end of this year,” [the WFP’s regional spokeswoman] said in an email late last week from her office in Bangkok. “We have received enough donations or promises of donations to enable us to reach the full caseload of 1.1 million women and children per month until the end of March 2015.” North Korea’s official name is the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. She added, however, that...

Categories Famine & Food Aid
October 30, 2014

What else is Kim Jong Un buying instead of food? A new airport.

The new airport, which is now in its final stages, is the latest of North Korea’s “speed campaigns,” mass mobilizations of labor shock brigades aimed at finishing top-priority projects in record time. Dressed in hard hats and brown or olive green uniforms, impressive swarms of workers toil under huge signs calling on them to carry out their tasks with “Korea Speed.” From some corners of the site, patriotic music blares from loudspeakers to provide further motivation. [….] But, in search...

Categories AP Watch/Famine & Food Aid
October 16, 2014

Swiss sold N. Korea $180K in cigarette-making machinery as aid agencies begged for donations

The communist country’s imports of Swiss tobacco machinery components reached US$180,000 in the January-June period, far more than the $24,000 worth of imports recorded for all of 2013, according to the report by the Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency (KOTRA). [….] The country imported $65.28 million of tobacco in 2013, about 77.8 times what the country sold overseas, the report showed. [Yonhap] On the plus side, the trade statistics also show that during the first six months of this year, North Korea...

Categories Europe/Famine & Food Aid
October 14, 2014

If Yoon Sang-Hyun’s information is correct, North Korea spends six times as much on luxury goods as on food for its hungry (corrected).

South Korean Saenuri Party lawmaker Yoon Sang-Hyun, citing Chinese Customs data and “studies on North Korean trade patterns” compiled by the National Intelligence Service South Korean government,* has leaked a report alleging that in 2013, Pyongyang imported $644 million in luxury goods. Yoon says this is enough to buy “more than 3.66 million tons of corn or 1.52 million tons of rice, far more than the country’s food shortage of 340,000 tons estimated by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/Sanctions