Search Results for: Ragan

Their coverage of Middle Eastern affairs may be distorted and venemous, but the BBC’s coverage of the next Great Famine is a public service to the world: North Korea has formally told the UN it no longer needs food aid, despite reports of malnutrition in the country. . . . Top UN relief co-ordinator Jan Egeland said an “abrupt” end to food aid would harm North Korea’s most vulnerable. . . . Analysts say North Korea might be worried that...

This is depressing, mostly because many people will die as a result: (Kyodo) _ The World Food Program is asking donor countries to support the U.N. agency’s plan to shift its assistance to North Korea from emergency relief to longer-term development aid, the head of the WFP’s Pyongyang office said Friday. Richard Ragan, the WFP’s director for North Korea, told Kyodo News in an interview in Beijing that the initial response from major donors, which include Japan and the United...

The Chosun Ilbo has printed a summary of a Financial Times story that may change your model of the North Korean economy, but not much. The story suggests that changes in economic policy in 2002 have in fact launched a limited number of small private businesses, and that those businesses are substantially enriching the people who run them. The World Food Program’s North Korea director Richard Ragan told the paper the wealthy are concentrated in five cities, including Pyongyang. They...

Disturbing reports of a dramatically worsening famine continue to filter out of North Korea, notwithstanding the regime’s Maoist mobilization of schoolchildren and office workers to the countryside. It’s not working, according to South Korean agricultural expert Kang Jong-Man, via the L.A. Times: The rice paddies are thin and uneven. Potato plants are pale and stunted. The fields are not properly graded. Barley still on the stalks should have been harvested weeks ago so that the same fields could be used...

Another sign that famine may be returning to North Korea, from today’s New York Times: To combat growing food shortages, the North Korean government is sending millions of city dwellers to work on farms each weekend, largely to transplant rice, according to foreign aid workers. “The staff that work for us, the staff that work in the ministries, are going out to help farmers,” said Richard Ragan, director of World Food Program operations in Pyongyang, referring to North Koreans who...

Another sign that famine may be returning to North Korea, from today’s New York Times: To combat growing food shortages, the North Korean government is sending millions of city dwellers to work on farms each weekend, largely to transplant rice, according to foreign aid workers. “The staff that work for us, the staff that work in the ministries, are going out to help farmers,” said Richard Ragan, director of World Food Program operations in Pyongyang, referring to North Koreans who...