Things are going from bad to worse for our neighbors in the North. The U.N. World Food Program says the DPRK needs $500 million dollars worth of food aid to avert a famine.
A recent WFP assessment found that more than half the country’s households are eating only two meals a day and that cereal prices have risen by as much as 300 percent over the past year.
Citizens eligible for food rations have seen their allocation cut from 500 grams a day to 150 grams, Banbury reported. Few North Koreans eat meat except on major national holidays when the government distributes it, he added.
The WFP report classifies most of the country as suffering “an acute food and livelihood crisis,” the UN agency’s representative in Pyongyang, Jean-Pierre de Margerie, said. Remote and especially poor districts in the northeast are facing a “humanitarian emergency,” he added.
Of note, North Korea is, for the first time, accepting aid from the United States, though it points out that it is currently refusing assistance from South Korea.
Tags: news, North Korea
{ 1 comment }
alicia 09.12.08 at 3:37 am
Last year, I heard an 18 year old defector from North Korea speak at NYU. His father was a military general in Pyongyang, which meant that they were relatively well off, but he spoke of how most families (even within his upper ranking social circle) ate 2 meals per day. He did speak of an incident with a friend’s cousin who had traveled from the country in order to escape the starvation that had claimed her entire family. He said that parts of her face had decayed because of the lack of nutrients. I guess the sad thing is that this starvation is nothing new. It’s been going on since at least the ’90s, and there’s no sign that it’s going to stop any time soon.
Comments on this entry are closed.