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Category: Famine & Food Aid

February 24, 2011

Is the paradigm shifting on hunger in North Korea? (Also, fiskings of Chris Hill and Selig Harrison)

OFK regulars should all know how much regard I have for Christopher Hill. So are my own preconceptions causing me to find something vaguely repellent in the way Hill frames the issue of food aid, or do others see things the way I do? Would food aid help to ensure the survival of a state whose treatment of its own citizens is among the most abysmal in the world? If so, and if denying food aid would result in a...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/Fiskings/Useful Idiocy
February 8, 2011

South Korea should close Kaesong and encourage remittances.

The Chosun Ilbo reports that as the North Korean diaspora swells, those who have escaped are forming stronger financial links with their hungry families in the homeland. And this has some people concerned: North Korean defectors settled in South Korea are sending some US$10 million a year to their families back home, it was reported on Sunday. The amount is expected to grow as there are more than 20,000 North Korean defectors in the South and the number is increasing,...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/NK Economics/Refugees/Regime Change/Subversion
December 13, 2010

From Cradle to Grave, So Goes the Expression

There is no food emergency in the country now and things can only get better. — Alejandro Cao de Benos Theresa forwards confirmation, via the Daily NK, of my worst fears for a 23 year-old woman who all but recited her own obituary for the guerrilla cameras of Rimjingang: “It was discovered that, without a home, she had been wandering in the market and on the streets, before dying in a corn field,” the Asia Press spokesperson explained, “Since then...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/Human Rights/NK Military
October 30, 2010

Ban Ki Moon calls on everyone (except Kim Jong Il) to cover North Korea’s grocery bils.

As I noted the other day, North Korea has announced its traditional million-ton food production shortfall for this year. True to form, its government has found a uniquely obnoxious way to address this that has nothing to do with increasing domestic food production or diverting foreign exchange toward the purchase of food: North Korea demanded massive food aid from South Korea in return for concessions over a reunion programme for separated families, a Seoul official said. The demand for 500,000...

Categories "United" Nations/Famine & Food Aid
July 13, 2010

Götterdämmerung Watch

Open News reports that banditry by hungry North Korean soldiers is turning the population against the army: According to our source, this kind of situation, where soldiers clean out cattle pens, steal pickled cabbages, take everything from people walking in the streets, and rape women in broad day, has been going on for a long time ““ ever since Kim il-sung’s death. The source revealed, that North Korean residents looking at rice bags with American flags say, “They once said...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/NK Military/Propaganda
July 9, 2010

Food Supplies, Prices Stabilize Amid Slow Recovery of N. Korea’s Markets

The good news for North Koreans who’ve been written off the state’s dole is that food prices have mostly stabilized. The bad news is that quite a few of them have lost ground in their unending race against the Reaper: A source inside North Korea explained, “Since the redenomination, some people have dropped from ‘middle income’ to ‘poor.’ As a result, demand for corn has increased, and that is the reason why corn prices have gone up. Some people still...

Categories Famine & Food Aid
July 7, 2010

Prostitution Said to Be Widespread in Chongjin

Next time one of North Korea’s apologists speaks of its pristine moral vales, gender equality, or absence of sexist billboards, someone remind me to point them to this: “The prostitution of teenage females is rampant, which has forced the security services of Chongjin to dispatch plain-clothed security officers to the station to crackdown on it. But the cleverly disguised prostitution of female university students is increasing, and some of them have close relationships with the same security officials who are...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/NK Crime
June 19, 2010

WaPo: North Korea Lifts Market Restrictions

In Part Three of my capitalist manifesto, I’d documented North Korea’s efforts throughout 2009 to destroy the markets on which most of the North Korean people had come to rely on for their survival. The efforts included with bans on imported goods, the closure of large markets, the imposition of restrictions on who could sell in others, and finally, the Great Confiscation, which wiped out the savings of millions of families, along with the working capital of the traders who...

Categories Capitalism/Famine & Food Aid
June 14, 2010

Hard Times in the North

Report: North Korea cuts state rations, forced to lift market restrictions after China fails to deliver on aid. Assuming this report is accurate, my guess is that those who suffer most from this will be the enlisted ranks in less-favored military units and lower-ranking state workers. Most people are already cut out of the ration system and dependent on the markets, and the regime always seems to find enough food for the Inner Party, the officers, the internal security services,...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/Refugees
April 23, 2010

Absolute Must-See: Video of Onsung Market, Before and After The Great Confiscation

I knew Onsung was a shit hole, but wow. Just, wow. Watch it here — English subtitles and all — and read about it in the New York Times. Don’t miss the corrupt officials shaking down the merchants, or the South Korean Red Cross aid for sale. We’ve seen other video showing American aid being sold, too, as well as previous reports of South Korean food aid being confiscated and diverted for military use. Could individual corrupt officials be responsible...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/NK Economics
April 23, 2010

Is There Still a Case for Food Aid to North Korea?

I’ve generally been underwhelmed by the performance of the Human Rights Industry when it comes to North Korea, but Kay Seok of Human Rights Watch is a bright light in this dreary landscape. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Seok finds the regime’s misappropriation of its resources on a Kimjongilia flower festival to be “outrageous” at a time when “North Koreans may face the worst food shortage since a famine claimed a million lives in the 1990s.” But if that...

Categories Famine & Food Aid
April 14, 2010

Götterdämmerung Watch

The Wall Street Journal has two must-read op-eds on the decline of North Korea’s capacity to control the flow of food, money, and information within its territory. Marcus Noland, sounding very much like Kushibo, sees a “tipping point” after The Great Confiscation: Once broken, the economy may prove difficult to repair. Prices for goods such as rice, corn and the dollar rose 6,000% or more after the reform. And while prices have come down from their peak as the government...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/NK Economics/Subversion
April 9, 2010

North Korea and China Feast Amid Famine

As the food situation in North Korea continues to deteriorate for its most vulnerable, a South Korean NGO is sending 300 tons of flour and other supplies to help feed 12,000 “marginalized” people, including kids in 50 orphanages. The article mentions nothing about monitoring or nutritional surveys, so pray to a God they can’t that there will be a few dollops of gruel left for their begging bowls after all of the theft, diversion, and corruption. Note, by the way,...

Categories Appeasement/China & Korea/Famine & Food Aid/Six-Party Talks
April 2, 2010

Nothing to Envy, Except …

From KCNA: All the people should unite close around General Secretary Kim Jong Il and dynamically accelerate the on-going advance for a great surge to materialize President Kim Il Sung’s noble idea of believing in people as in Heaven and thus glorify this significant year as a year of great prosperity to be recorded long in the history of the country, urge papers Thursday in their editorials. [….] It is the unshakable resolution and will of Kim Jong Il to...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/Propaganda
March 12, 2010

North Korea Sanctions Itself

Reuters, citing a study by the Korea Development Institute (KDI), reports that “North Korea’s international trade dropped last year for the first time in more than a decade.” The report suggests that this was mostly the consequence of sanctions, but a closer look at the evidence it was The Great Confiscation that really brought trade across the Chinese border to a standstill by paralyzing the economy, markets, and trade, and banning the use of foreign currency in the final months...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/NK Economics
March 10, 2010

Bleak Signs for North Korea’s Food Situation (Updated)

Original Post, 10 March 2010: This week’s papers have several disturbing indicators suggesting that a sudden deterioration of the food situation is in the works. First was this report that even shops and hotels for foreigners in Pyongyang had run out of food; then, Robert linked to a report that kids can now seen begging even in Pyongyang. Depending on what you choose to believe, however, this may not be an entirely new development. Our friend Christine Ahn, no less,...

Categories Famine & Food Aid
March 5, 2010

Kim Il Sung’s Personal Shopper Writes Tell-All Book

Kim Jong Ryul, who spent 16 years under cover in Austria, also described how the “great leader” and his son and successor Kim Jong Il spent millions pampering and protecting themselves with Western goods — everything from luxury cars, carpets and exotic foods, to monitors that can detect heartbeats of people hiding behind walls and gold-plated handguns. The colonel’s account — told in a new book by Austrian journalists Ingrid Steiner-Gashi and Dardan Gashi — shows the deep divide between...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/Kim Jong Il/Sanctions/Useful Idiocy
February 10, 2010

North Korean Harvest Output Declines Again

Reports of short harvests have been perennial in North Korea since 1993, but the worst of the famine probably ended in 2000. Some credit the end of the famine to international food aid, but North Korea’s own restrictions on international food aid have kept most of it out since late 2005. That year, I predicted — wrongly — that the result would be another famine. Although the regime’s severe cutback on food aid certainly must have caused hardship for many...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/NK Economics