Category: Famine & Food Aid

For those of you who do not know him, Marcus Noland of the Peterson Institute for International Economics is  a leading expert and author  on the North Korean economy and  food crisis.  Noland writes in to  report that he has learned some details of the U.S. government’s negotiations with the North Koreans on food aid.  The  negotiations have resulted in an agreement (for now) on food aid to the North, something I personally support for overriding humanitarian reasons notwithstanding my...

Good Friends has released two more newsletters, numbered 129 and 130. No. 129 is partially made up of material I had passed along here yesterday, but picks up from there with some interesting reports about the food supply to the military. The reports are from Kangwan Province, which lies just north of the DMZ’s eastern sector. According to one soldier in Keumkang County, the soldiers in this county are experiencing a food shortage as well. They are fed with less...

While some reports continue to suggest that North Korea’s elite is still surviving by spending their savings in food markets, it also appears that the elite isn’t what it once was. Without as much food to go around, it no longer includes the entire population of Pyongyang or the “core” areas surrounding it. Today, according to Good Friends, the inhabitants of several districts in the privileged capital may be surviving on watery gruel. Nampo, the port city that serves Pyongyang,...

Marcus Noland and Stephan Haggard have just published three new op-eds in an attempt to sound the alarm about North Korea’s growing new famine. The first of these you should read is an extensive discussion of the evidence supporting their dire predictions in the Korea Herald (normally unlinkable, but uploaded in pdf here). The second is this op-ed at Newsweek, which draws an apt comparison to the situation in Burma. Although Noland and Haggard place most of the blame for...

Blogging will have to be light for a while, but fortunately, I’m now on the distro list for Good Friends, which welcomes recipients to redistribute its dispatches. Ven. Pomnyun also said Good Friends will increase the volume of dispatches it publishes. I’m going to republish two of them today, one of which I’ve grafed before. The obvious cautions apply, but overall, the evidence suggests that trends are very bleak in the short term — famine is killing a lot of...

Good Friends and the Daily NK continue to be our only sources of information about what is happening to the North Korean people as famine stalks some areas of the country. This isn’t going to be pleasant reading, and if you’re not well-braced to confront the hard realities of a collectivist utopia in which some animals are more equal than others, read no further. With the food crisis worsening on farms in Gumchun County in North Hwanghae Province, the number...

Here’s what the Financial Times is reporting today: Washington will supply 400,000 tonnes via the World Food Programme while US non-governmental organisations will distribute another 100,000 tonnes. President George W. Bush is expected to approve the deal “within days,” according to one official. [Financial Times, Demetri Sevastopulo] That probably means that at least the 400,000 tons of WFP aid will be channeled through the North Korean Public Distribution System, which has become infamous for diverting aid from less privileged people...

Update: SAIS just cancelled Friday’s presentation. Sorry. It is not the nature of famines to make heroes of men, but if a hero emerged from North Korea’s last Great Famine, it is the Buddhist monk the Venerable Pomnyun. I first heard of this man’s humanitarian work in Andrew Natsios’s “The Great North Korean Famine,” a book that, sadly, is must-reading once again. The Ven. Pomnyun, who leads the charity Good Friends, was one of the few South Koreans to speak...

The Daily NK continues to be our single best source of information from inside the North, despite the obvious limitations in confirmation, not to mention translation.  One pseudonymous interviewee, probably a trader, reports that food is still available in most of the cities  from Pyongyang  to Sinuiju, but for an exorbitant price (the most at-risk areas are along North Korea’s other coast).  It’s thinly sourced but interesting nonetheless.  So far, the interviewee says that food continues to be available for...

Those are the grim words of a North Korean interviewed in Good Friends’s latest newsletter, which reports that North Koreans — not just the usual concentration camp inmates and street orphans, but farmers  — are now dying of starvation because of the current food crisis: In the farming areas of the township of Yangduk, Yangduk County and the vicinity in South Pyongan Province , instances of people dying by starvation due to a shortage of food rations are appearing. Currently,...

The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) warned today that time is running out to avert looming food shortages and a potential humanitarian crisis in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) following confirmation of a critically low national harvest stemming in part from last year’s heavy August floods.  “The food security situation in the DPRK is clearly bad and getting worse,” said Tony Banbury, the World Food Programme’s Regional Director for Asia.  “It is increasingly likely that external assistance...

A new Good Friends dispatch is up on the Web.  The obvious caveats apply:  it’s 100% hearsay. Good Friends reports that  the traders who feed the northeastern city of Chongjin  are now wandering from town to town  to find food.  Many are going to Sinuiju and finding nothing; the place is in the middle of a major crackdown on markets.  Although Good  Friends does not say so explicitly,  protests in Chongjin appear to have ended, possibly with the dissenting  female...