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UN: North Korea Needs More Food UN: North Korea Needs More Food
By Martin Fackler
Associated Press
April 2, 1999Beijing - North Korea, struggling through a fourth year of famine, will run out of food this month, leaving its people to fend for themselves for two to three months until the summer harvest, a U.N. aid official said Friday.
Spring crops are being distributed and eaten as soon as they are harvested, making more aid a desperate need, said David Morton, the U.N. World Food Program's representative for North Korea. "In May and June, people in North Korea will be having to survive on whatever coping mechanisms they have,'' Morton told reporters.
The news comes amid an intelligence report by South Korea's main spy agency that the North is uprooting 2 million people from its capital and other cities and packing them off to become farmers in the countryside. Tens of thousands of hungry people have begun leaving the capital, Pyongyang, already as part of the five-year relocation program, said Lee Jong-chan, head of South Korea's National Intelligence Service.
"North Korea has frequently relocated its people. ... But this is by far the largest program we have seen,'' Lee told a parliamentary hearing held behind closed doors in the South Korean capital of Seoul. The migration would affect 8 percent of the North's population, he said. His remarks were distributed in a news release from the spy agency. Lee said the program appeared aimed at adding workers to the battered farm industry as well as removing the potential for unrest in major cities.
Meanwhile, Morton said the famine shows no signs of ending - until the North's secretive, Stalinist government finds some way to revive the economy. "The humanitarian aid is purely a holding action,'' he said. "It is not solving the problems. It is keeping alive the children.''
He said the WFP found people subsisting on tasteless cakes made of mashed corn cobs, cabbage stalks and grass. School yards had been dug up to plant vegetables, and classrooms were empty because kids are staying home, some too weak to go to school. Morton said the WFP's current relief supplies will run out in June, and he appealed to donor countries for more money.
Droughts, floods and tidal waves since 1995 pushed North Korea's tottering economy and collective agriculture into free-fall. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the loss of barter trade had already weakened the economy, depriving the country of such vital materials as fertilizer and tractor fuel.
Malnutrition remains widespread, leaving the possibility of an entire generation of children whose growth has been stunted, Morton said. "The 12-year-old looks 6 years old,'' he said.
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