SEOUL — In recent years, North Korea's Kim Jong Il ordered his army to build chicken farms to fight the country's chronic food shortage and sell poultry abroad for hard currency. Just this month, North Korean-raised chickens were due to be exported for the first time -- to South Korea.
For that reason, the first reported outbreak of avian flu in North Korea could have a devastating effect on the secretive, impoverished country.
In a rare moment of candor Sunday, the regime in Pyongyang confirmed rumors in the South Korean media that it was battling an epidemic of the deadly virus. Its official news agency said the flu had broken out at "a few chicken farms." No humans had been infected, it said, but in an effort to control the disease, "hundreds of thousands of chickens have been burned."
South Korean officials believe that the fact North Korea felt compelled to make the announcement suggests that the situation is far worse than described.
"It is our judgment seeing North Korea reveal itself in this way that they are experiencing difficulty in taking the necessary prevention and quarantine measures and that it must be quite serious," Kim Chun Sik, director of inter-Korean exchanges for the Unification Ministry, said Wednesday.
Another sign of Pyongyang's concern is its decision to promptly accept an assessment team from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. Hans Wagner, a senior official from the agency's Thailand office, flew in Tuesday and will be joined by two more officials this week.
The U.N. team is bringing diagnostic kits to determine whether North Korea's avian flu is the dreaded H5N1 strain, which has spread through Southeast Asia. That virus can be transmitted from birds to humans and is blamed for the deaths of 48 people since late 2003.
The seriousness of the outbreak is also evident from accounts by businesspeople and aid workers who have visited Pyongyang.
"When I went to the market, there was no poultry at all and not a single egg. To me, that signaled they are on the alert," said Kathi Zellweger of the Roman Catholic charity Caritas, recalling an experience of March 19.
There have been reports in the South Korean media that large numbers of troops have been deployed to carry out the slaughter and burial of the chickens and that up to 10 million birds may have been destroyed.
