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...