Category: Famine & Food Aid

The World Food Program will ask  South Korea to contribute aid for North Korea within the next 10 days.  Presumably, the aid would go through the WFP, which would represent a significant shift away from the Roh / DJ policy of giving unilateral and effectively  unmonitored aid, will full knowledge that most of it will end up in the wrong stomachs.  Lee  appears to understand  that unmonitored aid only prolongs the hunger and misery.  Left to set its own priorities,...

Good Friends was our early warning system.  Now that the famine has begun, the U.N. is sounding an alarm.  North Korea is heading toward its worst food crisis since the 1990s because of flooding, successive crop failures and worldwide inflation for staples such as rice and corn, the United Nations World Food Program said Wednesday. The agency shied away from predicting another famine like the one that killed as many as 2 million people in the 1990s, but said its...

Good Friends had previously passed along rumors that an avian flu epidemic is spreading through northeastern North Korea.  Now, the regime is denying that, for whatever it’s worth.

MARCUS NOLAND FORWARDS  two more updates on  North Korea’s food situation.  The first (“North Korea: The Emergence of Pre-famine Conditions”) is co-authored with Stephan  Haggard; the second (“Korean Institutional Reform in Comparative Perspective”) is co-authored with Erik Weeks.  RICE EATERS, CORN EATERS, GRASS EATERS:  The Daily NK has  more on how the different classes in North Korea are surviving the current food crisis, and a very detailed report on food aid monitoring and manipulation.  Among other things, some members of...

Here’s Good Friends Newsletter 143:  good-friends-143.pdf A lot of people are getting sick and dying in the northeast due to a mysterious illness. The North Koreans seem to think that they have an outbreak of avian flu on their hands. If that’s true, we can thank His Porcine Majesty for a global health crisis that governments worldwide have dreaded and braced for. Among the places where dead birds were found, and where one child died, is Camp 16.  Bird-flu Virus...

Good Friends Newsletter Number 138 is here: nkt138-eng1.pdf   Highlights: Skyrocketing rice prices top W4,500/kG in South Hwanghae, W4,200 in North Hwanghae.  Corn at approx. W2,000/kG;   Starving North Koreans dying from eating grass, spoiled food; Middle-class North Koreans selling luxury possessions for a fraction of their former value (VCR’s, refrigerators, TV’s); Regime allows some food-seekers into China; This won’t be good for military morale: The 4th corps headquarters of Hwanghae Province fell far short in military food supplies this...

Good Friends Newsletter No. 137 is here:  nkt137-eng1.pdf Highlights: Rising mortality in both South and North Hwanghae provinces from famine and the effects of “alternative” foods made of grass; Mysterious disease spreads, kills kids near Chinese border regions; doctors guess  it could be  avian flu or hand-foot-and mouth disease; Frost kills crop seedlings in North Pyongan; Amid fertilizer shortage, regime set quota for human excrement (seriously) that starving people can’t meet; Hungry North Koreans express resentment at growing class divisions,...

Good Friends Dispatch No. 136  is here:  nkt136-eng1.pdf Highlights: Regime promotes “alternative foods,” generally  made of grass; Some local officials turning to traders to feed the starving; central government fires one local official for taking out a “food loan;” Rising death toll among farmers in Kangwon and near Hamheung; Situation in Sinuiju is desperate, but not yet in famine condition; High absenteeism from munitions factory in Eundok County; workers are too weakened by hunger; In Pyongyang, hard times but relatively...

[Update:    For some reason,  the links to those Good Friends  reports are finicky.  Try this: newsletter-number-133.pdf newsletter-number-134.pdf  ] 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...