There are reports coming out of North Korea again that
they are suffering from a severe shortfall in food supplies. North Korean
emissaries have gone on a multi-national tour asking foreign governments to
resume food assistance programs to feed their malnourished population.
This is not a new scenario for North Korea. The regime
has continually struggled to feed its people since the famine of the mid 1990s
when over one million lost their lives.
What is more shocking is the effect the many years of
living on less than 1,700 calories a day have had on the general population. I
saw this first hand in a Pyongyang park in 2008 where some elderly people were
quietly harvesting grass so they could supplement a meal. Those in the NGO
community with access to remote areas of the country have confirmed many in
North Korea suffer from malnutrition and infection. In many cases, people
outside of the capital are on the brink of starvation.
Today, a North Korean child can expect to be up
to 7 inches shorter than his/her South Korean counterpart and 20 pounds
lighter by adulthood.
A recent Washington
Post article
stated that the North Korean request has "put the
United States and other Western countries in the uncomfortable position of
having to decide whether to ignore the pleas of a starving country or pump food
into a corrupt distribution system that often gives food to those who need it
least."
Not if the policy makers in Washington use the
agreement reached in 2008, which remedied past problems of the regime diverting
humanitarian food shipments to the military or for black market revenues.
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