North Korea's dictatorship cares more for its nukes than food for its people
Monday, May 5, 2008 Free Headline Alerts
UNITED NATIONS — A summertime famine looms in North Korea as the reclusive communist country has again seen a precipitous shortfall in food production According to UN humanitarian officials, following a disastrous harvest, food deficits will double over last year’s already poor output and reach the most dangerous levels since 2001. And while food shortages plague the quaintly-titled Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) the Pyongyang leadership still pursues its nuclear proliferation despite polite warnings to cease from the international community.
The UN World Food Program confirms a “critically low national harvest stemming in part for last years floods.” According to Tony Banbury the agency’s regional director for Asia, “The food situation in the DPRK is clearly bad and getting worse. It is increasingly likely that external assistance will be urgently required to avert a serious tragedy.”
Shortfalls for 2008 are projected as 1.66 million metric tons, double last year’s deficit and the most dangerous level since 2001. At the same time food prices for an already impoverished population have jumped leading the WFP country director Jean-Pierre de Margerie to warn, “The rapid rise in the real prices of food for persons living in the DPRK conforms WFP’s fears that the DPRK may suffer deeper and more widespread hunger this year.”
The UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization states that 2007 agricultural production reached only three million metric tons of cereals, rice, maize, wheat, barley and potatoes. This represents a 25 percent decrease from 2007 and the poorest harvest since 2001. Given that disastrous North Korean harvests in the mid-1990’s triggered a famine killing a few million people, the current crisis may be dangerously underestimated.
Blaming the weather is a standard practice for food shortages in dictatorships.
Stalin’s Russia created famine in the agriculturally bountiful Ukraine, Mao’s maniacal farm policies triggered near perpetual shortfalls in Mainland China, and food shortages plague the Pyongyang regime which has long decided to opt for guns over butter.
Until 2005, the WFP was assisting six million people or a quarter of the entire North Korean population! But since the Pyongyang regime told the WFP to cut back on its operations the humanitarian agency has been aiding about a million persons. Still the Rome-based UN agency fears that over six million North Koreans continue to suffer from food insecurity, “a figure that is expected to rise if action is not taken to address growing food shortages.”
Naturally there are calls for international assistance. Until recently neighboring South Korea was a major donor providing $20 million, followed by Russia ($8 million), Germany ($3.4 million) and one million each from Canada, Denmark, Ireland and Norway. Yet with the new conservative government in Seoul, the South Koreans are not so willing to simply subsidize the communist regime in the North without clear and long overdue concessions by the DPRK dictatorship on human rights, security issues, and most especially its nuclear weapons program.
Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, during a recent meeting with the newly inaugurated South Korean President Lee Myung-bak at the UN stressed, “we also discussed the nuclear issue and the situation on the Korean Peninsula and how to promote better inter-Korean relationship.” Ban added, “I am also committed to facilitating, as Secretary General of the United Nations, to the ongoing peace process as well as implementation of nuclear issues on the Korean Peninsula.”
Achieving that peace in part rests with the United States. Multilateral negotiations, the Six Party Talks aimed at achieving North Korean nuclear disarmament, may be sidetracked by a State Department compromise which would see a flawed deal between Washington and Pyongyang. The agreement would accept DRPK nuclear statements, on trust, that it is not pursuing uranium enrichment, production, nor proliferation to Syria or Islamic Iran. Demanding nuclear accountability from one of the world’s most secretive regimes, remains an overriding requirement, a clear necessity, not a negotiating point.
The DPRK’s root problem, be it the food shortages or its nuclear proliferation, lies with the very nature of Kim Jong-il’s totalitarian rule which has long-mixed Marxism, militarism, the cult of personality and shamanism to create a bizarre nationalistic regime which has ceaselessly pursued the nuclear genie at the expense of nutrition for the Korean people.