It seems that China has just recently provided about 300,000 tons of food to North Korea last year to ease its chronic shortages.
China, the North’s sole major ally, has long been its chief energy and food supplier.
Unification Minister Hyun In-Taek gave the figure in a report Tuesday to a closed session of a parliamentary committee, his office said, adding the food was provided either on credit or as aid.
The ministry, which handles cross-border relations, gave no further details. The website of Chosun Ilbo newspaper estimated that 300,000 tons equals one month’s supply for the communist nation’s entire population of 24 million.
A bungled currency revaluation last November by the North has reportedly played havoc with distribution networks, aggravating food shortages and sparking inflation.
Hyun said the North was trying to ease the problems.
“North Korea has been suffering from problems in food supply and distribution since its currency reform and has been taking measures to deal with the situation,” he told legislators Tuesday.
China, the North’s sole major ally, has long been its chief energy and food supplier.
Liberty in North Korea (LINK), which is one of the most active and largest organizations helping North Korean refugees, is competing with 189 organizations for the grant from Pepsi and only the top 2 will be awarded $250k.
The poll ends on February 28th, and anyone can vote once a day, but can vote again daily every day. It’s currently in the 4th place, 2 more spots to go. Here is a message from Hannah Song, the president of LINK:
Here’s some information about our project idea: Liberty House. Since the passage of the North Korean Human Rights act in 2004, almost 100 North Korean refugees have resettled here in the US, all over the country.
LiNK has helped to resettle fifteen of these refugees and has sought to provide them with supplementary assistance (scholarships, financial aid, tutoring, mentoring, community, etc). With the launch of our recent campaign over the holidays, TheHundred, we anticipate many more refugees making it here to the US over the next year.
We have had the tremendous privilege to see refugees as young as 14 and as old as 65 settle down and begin new lives; a couple finally married after waiting years in the underground; two babies born here who are now American citizens; a young woman already in community college studying to be a counselor for other North Korean women who were also sexually trafficked. Although learning a new language and culture are difficult, they are resilient, hard-working and determined to take on this new opportunity.
Through our extensive research surveying refugees who have resettled both in the US and in Korea, and observing resettlement centers in South Korea (including Hanawon and other agencies), we realize that the assistance they receive from the government is often not enough.
We are taking those learnings to create a unique program here in the US to help refugees acculturate and succeed in their new lives. With this grant we will be able to launch a transitional home that will serve as a safe environment and community for these refugees as they learn English, American culture and history, how to use an ATM and sign-up for a grocery card, apply for their citizenship and find a job, and eventually gain independence to successfully live on their own. We have many of the partnerships already in place – but we lack the funding to move forward.
We are SO close and are very hopeful that we could win this! We need everyone’s vote once a day, every day, until February 28th. Pepsi will award the $250k to the top 2 groups. Signing up only takes a few minutes and voting takes 30 seconds! Please vote here and help us spread the word by tweeting, facebooking, emailing and asking your friends, family and networks.
The few reporters and toursits who get a chance to go to North Korea from the western world seldom venture far from the capital Pyongyang where the same circuit of buildings, monuments and museums only serve to falsify the life of the majority of the population.
But Nate Groth, Portsmouth, N.H., native has been where less than 3,000 other western tourists have ever ventured. s
A North Korean soldier stands in part of a 2½-mile buffer zone separating North and South Korea. The area is filled with mines and what Portsmouth native Nate Groth described as “Indiana Jones-like traps.”
A five-day tour of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea showed him a land where there is no electricity or hot water (except in the capital city), where the streets are so desolate people can play Frisbee on the highway, and where Kim Il Sung still reins, even in death, as the “Eternal President.”
“North Korea is probably the most reclusive and closed society in the world, which is why I wanted to go,” Groth said during a slideshow of his visit shown at the Buoy gallery in Kittery on Thursday night. “Entering their country is like entering their own little world.”
Groth’s stay took him to the capital city of Pyongyang, through the North Korean countryside and to the Demilitarized Zone, which leads to one of the most dangerous borders in the world.
Groth described a country where perception is everything. Even when many North Koreans go hungry, tourists enjoy all-you-can-eat buffets and stay in the same three hotels, complete with a spa, a revolving rooftop restaurant and a micro brewery.
It is mandatory that all tourists attend the Mass Games, North Korea’s response to the Olympics. Groth said the experience was a 90-minute non-stop spectacle, with up to 100,000 North Koreans on display performing daily from August to October.
“North Koreans are very proud of the games,” Groth said. “They have a different attitude. Nationalism is at the heart of it. Everything about the games brings glory to North Korea.”
JoongAng Daily’s article features a story of Ji-Eun, a North Korean defector who currently resides in Seoul. Her father died in North Korea when she was little and the family had a hard time carving out a living in the poverty stricken nation. In 2000, when she was 6 years old, her mother decided to escape North Korea with Ji-eun in a hope to find food and a better living.
After living anxiously in China for a while, they eventually ended up boarding on a plane heading to South Korea.
Ji-eun pictured a wonderful life in South Korea when she was on the plane. But after she arrived, she found that things were quite different than what she had imagined, recalled Ji-eun, who turned 15 this year.
“Why did you come to Korea, you beggar?” one person asked her. “Were you hungry?”
“Go back to your country because there’s nothing we can give you,” said another.
The rest of the article can be found here, and it needs some moment to think about what it means for N. Korean defectors to face not acceptance but isolation and discrimination by the society even after their life-risking escape out of North Korea. Ji-eun’s story is especially telling because it may well represent the sad story of hundreds of thousands of N.Korean defectors, and by all means, ourselves.
North Korea’s severe food shortages are expected to worsen this year after a poor grain harvest in 2009. s
The unification ministry, which handles cross-border relations, said the communist state produced an estimated 4.11 million tons of grain last year, a five percent drop from 4.3 million tons in 2008.
Annual demand is 5.4 million tons, according to the state-run Korea Rural Economic Institute (KREI) in Seoul.
The estimated shortfall of 1.29 million tons is equivalent to almost four months’ food supply this year, senior KREI analyst Kwon Tae-Jin told AFP.
Kwon, who helped analyse the grain production data, said the poor harvest was due to bad weather and a lack of fertiliser in the nation of 24 million people.
The South has suspended annual shipments of fertiliser and food to the North since 2008, while the North has relied on outside humanitarian aid to help feed its people since the mass famine in 1990s which killed hundreds of thousands.
Despite the chronic hunger, the North in March last year refused further US food aid as relations worsened over Pyongyang’s planned ballistic missile launch.
A shock currency revaluation last November 30 has reportedly played havoc with distribution networks, aggravating food shortages and sparking inflation.
An American Christian activist Robert Park , having been detained in North Korea since the last Christmas, has been released and arrived in Beijing today. He will later be taken to the U.S. embassy. s
s … according to comments attributed to Robert Park by Pyongyang’s Korean Central News Agency, the North Koreans have convinced him that he was wrong in his view of the North, whose “concentration camps,” Mr. Park said in an earlier interview with Reuters, were “of the same brutality as in Nazi Germany.”
In the same report in which the KCNA dispatch announced that Park would be freed, he was quoted as saying that “people have been incredibly kind and generous here to me, very concerned for my physical health as never before in my life.” He was, he was quoted as saying, “very thankful for their love.” [Christian Science Monitor] s
KCNA said Park had confessed to illegally entering the state and that he had changed his mind about North Korea after receiving kind treatment there.
“What I have seen and heard in the DPRK convinced me that I misunderstood it. So I seriously repented of the wrong I committed, taken in by the West’s false propaganda,” KCNA quoted Park as saying. [Reuters]s
Some may find this response from Park as somewhat unexpected, but the quotes that the North Korean agency claims to be Park’s are no way to be trusted as accurate until he reveals his experiences and the decision through his own sincere voice.
So what did Park accomplish? It may be not as intangible as it seems. Perhaps, thanks to his decision to make a life-risking entry into North Korea, the manifest human rights abuses and the misgovernment of Kim Jong-Il regime could take another rare chance to come under the world’s spotlight once more without the loss of anyone’s life.
Some raise doubt as to the importance of raising worldwide attention on substantially improving the actual living conditions of North Koreans. But in the long run, the greater public and media awareness is indispensable to a more powerful and united voice from the international community that may be effective enough to induce any internal changes in North Korea.
It seems that China has just recently provided about 300,000 tons of food to North Korea last year to ease its chronic shortages.
