North Korean facade of self-sufficiency can't hide signs of hunger
In the countryside, listless adults and children wander about. Many in the isolated nation try to work the fields, but lack fertilizer and equipment.
Reporting from Nampo, North Korea — Along the sides of the road, people comb through the grass looking for edible weeds. In the center of town, a boy about 9 years old wears a tattered army jacket hanging below his knees. He has no shoes.
Sprawled on the lawn outside a bathhouse, poorly dressed people lie on the grass, either with no better place to go or no energy to do so at 10 a.m. on a weekday.
Despite efforts to keep North Korea's extreme poverty out of view, a glance around the countryside shows a population in distress. At the root of the problem is a chronic food shortage, the result of inflation, strained relations with neighboring countries and flooding in previous years.
Aid agencies say the level of hunger is not at the point it was in the 1990s, when it was defined as a famine, although they have found a few cases of children suffering from kwashiorkor, the swollen belly syndrome associated with malnutrition. Mostly what they are seeing is a kind of collective listlessness -- the kind shown by the people on the streets of Nampo.
"Teachers report that children lack energy and are lagging in social and cognitive development," reported a group of five U.S. humanitarian agencies in a summer assessment of the food situation. "Workers are unable to put in full days and take longer to complete tasks -- which has implications for the success of the early and main harvests."
Hospitals complained to aid workers of rising infant mortality and declining birth weights. They also said they were seeing 20% to 40% more patients with digestive disorders caused largely by poor nutrition.
The U.N. World Food Program reached similar conclusions. In a recent survey of 375 households, more than 70% were found to be supplementing their diet with weeds and grasses foraged from the countryside. Such wild foods are difficult to digest, especially for children and the elderly. The survey also determined that most adults had started skipping lunch, reducing their diet to two meals a day.
These are some of the same signs that augured the mid-1990s famine, which killed as many as 2 million people, 10% of the population.
"The current situation hasn't reached the famine proportions that it did during the 1990s. Our hope and goal is to keep it from going over the precipice," said Nancy Lindborg, president of Mercy Corps, one of the U.S. aid organizations working in North Korea. "You have a number of factors that have conspired to create a really tough food situation."
- U.S. Plans $6.2 Million in Food Aid to N. Korea Jun 13, 1996
- U.S. to Give N. Korea $6.2 Million in Aid Jun 13, 1996
- North Korea's food shortage may worsen, agency says. Apr 17, 2008
