Category: Famine & Food Aid

Good Friends has published its latest dispatch from the Untergang in Pyongyang: all food rations in the capital appear to have stopped, and there are rising fears of famine in the countryside: North Korea’s food shortages are so bad that even its elite citizens in Pyongyang will not get state food rations until September, a local relief group said Thursday. Seoul-based Good Friends said the North has decided to suspend state food rations in the capital city for six months...

The Washington Post is the latest news source to note the deterioration of North Korea’s food situation.  The  Post suggests that  this time could be different from the Great Famine, when millions died quietly.  A grim rite of spring in Northeast Asia is the calculation of how many North Koreans could starve before the fall harvest — and what the neighbors are willing to do about it.  This year, though, the famine bailout season is more urgent, more complicated and...

In a recent newsletter, the Good Friends, a South Korean aid group, said that only those people in North Korea with relatively good living conditions have managed to live on daily meals, while poorer people have been on the verge of starvation in advance of spring, typically a season in which food shortages are at their most severe. [Hankyoreh] The Hanky, overlooking the impact of the North Korean regime’s own rejection of most international food aid, cites three factors in...

All of the worst stories that hardly anyone ever hears happen in North Korea, and here is one of the best worst stories I’ve heard.  It’s  an object lesson in how  useless  good intentions  can be when bad intentions have all the spine.  In 1997, at the peak of the Great Famine, documentary filmmaker Mark Davis  accompanied a Care  aid worker  — and two North Korean minders — into the North Korean countryside.   They went there to  looking, in vain,...

The Rural Development Administration of South Korea, via the Daily NK, reports that  this year’s cereal crop in North Korea  may be  2.5 million (metric?) tons short of the country’s needs, at just over 4 million tons.  Although these figures are obviously of questionable reliability, when compared to prior-year harvests,  a 4M-ton cereal harvest  would be about mid-range between the harvest figures at the height of the Great Famine and the years since then.   In relative terms, however,  food deficit...

A combination of last summer’s floods and political idiocy have again combined to worsen the lot of North Koreans: [I]n August, no food was distributed in the east Pyongyang area. In September, only a half of residents in the area received food rations. In the following month, all received their food. In November, not all received their rations as in September.  [Daily NK] When rations aren’t passed out, citizens have to rely on markets for their food supply.  But in...

I want to begin this post with a correction.   On  October 29th, commenter  Marion Spina, referring to the  seventh “See Also” item in this post,  said: Question on your post: “I’m suspicious of the Eugene Bell foundation, because it recently received a “frienship” medal from the North Korean government, and because you don’t win Kim Jong Il’s friendship by asking hard questions and without paying for it. Based on this document, I infer that the Bell foundation is having some...