MALNUTRITION: North Korea: Child malnutrition rising sharply in North Korea

Nov 25, 2011 : AFP


Three million people in North Korea will need food aid in 2012 and malnutrition among young children is rising despite bigger harvests, the UN said on Friday after a visit to the secretive communist state.
"Nearly three million people will continue to require food assistance in 2012," said the report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and World Food Programme (WFP), which are both based in Rome.
"Hospital staff told the assessment mission of a significant increase in malnutrition among young children," it said.
"Some paediatric wards indicated that cases admitted for malnutrition since April had doubled compared to the same period in 2010."
The report said that it expected this year's harvest to be around 8.5 per cent higher than last year but warned that domestic production and government food imports were not enough to cover needs.
"There remains an uncovered cereal deficit of 414,000 tons," it said.
It also called on North Korea to switch to more mechanised and more efficient forms of farming in order to increase productivity.
"Paddy yields at 4.3 tons per hectare in DPRK are about 60 per cent of those in neighbouring South Korea," said FAO economist Kisan Gunjal.
"This productivity gap represents a potential for the North to increase its farm output and eliminate chronic food shortages by adopting appropriate technology, inputs and measures," Gunjal said.
http://health.asiaone.com/Health/News/Story/A1Story20111125-312738.html

MALNUTRITION: North Korea: The politics of hunger

May 12th 2011

IT IS the time of year when the previous harvest has been nearly eaten and the next one has just been planted. Time, in other words, to worry about North Korea’s perennially hungry masses.



North Korea had long grown dependent on food handouts from its estranged brother, South Korea, and from the United States. But the South’s current president, Lee Myung-bak, has taken a tougher line, tying assistance to less provocative behaviour by Kim Jong Il’s nuclear-tipped regime. So Mr Kim’s envoys have travelled further afield of late, reportedly doing the rounds of Europe.
The UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) is now preparing to distribute emergency aid to 3.5m North Koreans suffering from “severe malnutrition”. Programme officials are concerned about the possibility of a famine on the scale of the one in the mid-1990s, in which over 1m died. They blame a series of shocks, including the coldest winter in years, widespread flooding and an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease among livestock. Some 297,000 tonnes of cereal and 137,000 tonnes of fortified blended food must reach the most vulnerable.
With murky data, and diplomats and foreign-aid staff restricted in where they may travel, not everyone agrees with the WFP’s assessment. Certainly, estimating North Korea’s food needs has long been a politicised business. A member of South Korea’s ruling Grand National Party, Yoon Sang-hyun, says that the North is hoarding 1m tonnes of rice, playing up a shortfall in order to get aid on the cheap. Some say Mr Kim wants the aid in order to announce a bumper harvest in 2012. That year is the 100th anniversary of North Korea’s founder, Mr Kim’s father, Kim Il Sung. Something approaching paradise has long been promised to North Koreans for 2012.
The South’s unification minister, Hyun In-taek, also suspects North Korea of exaggerating its troubles for political gain. Certainly, he says, starvation has begun to overshadow other topics that the South would rather discuss, namely denuclearisation and the North’s refusal to apologise for last year’s shelling of Yeonpyeong island and the presumed sinking in March 2010 of a naval corvette. This is apparently a view shared by Daily NK, an activist network and news source which says that the price of rice in the black market has actually fallen by around half in recent months.
Others, such as Good Friends, a South Korean Buddhist charity long working in the North, insist the situation is very bad—and that tuberculosis is on the rise owing to malnutrition. Rimjingang, a magazine with reporters secretly stationed in North Korea, says that in North Pyongan province by the Chinese border even the army is going hungry.
Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland, both at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, DC, say that even though the WFP has overstated the case, “all indicators point to a deteriorating food-security situation”. What is more, they take issue with Mr Lee’s belief that withholding aid will temper the North’s behaviour. Rather, they argue, the response will merely be for the hermit kingdom to “hunker down and tighten repression”. The regime has been consistent chiefly in showing complete disregard for its people.
But arguing is pointless. Widespread malnutrition and starvation in at least some parts of the country is a reality in North Korea. For Jimmy Carter, the former American president, who visited Pyongyang recently, the fault lies mainly with South Korea and the United States. That is presumably tonic to the real culprit for the hunger, the chubby Dear Leader, Kim Jong Il.
http://www.economist.com/node/18682803?story_id=18682803&fsrc=rss

MALNUTRITION: North Korea: WFP To Begin Emergency Food Campaign

May 02, 2011

The U.N. World Food Program (WFP) on Friday said it would begin providing emergency food aid to 3.5 million people in North Korea, Reuters reports (Mackenzie, 4/29).
"WFP officials said North Korea is short on food because of a rough winter, crop loss and the inability to get cereal supplies from outside countries," United Press International writes (4/29). "Women and children will be the focus of the one-year WFP operation, which follows an assessment by several aid agencies of food security inside the DPRK, according to a press release issued by the agency," the U.N. News Centre writes. WFP predicts that the operation will cost just over $200 million.
"We face a critical window to get supplies into the country and reach the millions who are already hungry," said Amir Abdulla, WFP's deputy executive director and chief operating officer. "Our primary concern is for those who are most vulnerable to shocks in the food supply – children, mothers, the elderly and large families," Abdulla added (4/29).
In its release, the agency said though "acute malnutrition has not reached crisis levels, widespread chronic malnutrition and the poor diet ... mean that if there is any significant reduction in food intake the situation could deteriorate rapidly," Reuters reports (4/29). The U.N. News Centre notes that UNICEF has 'launched a $20 million appeal to fund assistance programmes in the five DPRK provinces with the highest rates of malnutrition and in other counties with similar problems" (4/29).
Also on Friday, the State Department "refuted charges by former President Jimmy Carter that the United States and South Korea were withholding food aid from North Korea for political motives," CNN reports (Dougherty/Carter, 4/29). After his trip to the country last week, former President "Carter accused the U.S. and South Korea of human rights violations against North Koreans by withholding food aid," the BBC reports. "One of the most important human rights is to have food to eat, and for South Korea and the U.S. and others to deliberately withhold food aid to the North Korean people is really a human-rights violation," he said.
"As you know well, the North Koreans were the ones who abruptly suspended the aid program in 2009, ordering our humanitarian personnel to leave the country and leave behind 20,000 metric tons of US food," said Jacob Sullivan, the state department's policy planning director. "Everyone should remember who is responsible for the plight of the North Korean people, and that is the North Korean government itself," he said (4/30).
http://globalhealth.kff.org/Daily-Reports/2011/May/02/GH-050211-NK-Food-Aid.aspx?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+kff%2Fkdghpr+%28Kaiser+Daily+Global+Health+Policy+Report%29

MALNUTRITION: North Korea: U.N. body starts emergency food aid

Apr 29, 2011 (Reuters)
(Writing by James Mackenzie; Editing by Janet Lawrence)


The United Nations World Food Programme is to start an emergency food programme to help 3.5 million people in North Korea, the Rome-based organisation said on Friday.
"A bitter winter, crop loss and a lack of resources to secure cereal supplies from outside the country have left the Democratic People's Republic of Korea highly vulnerable to food shortages," it said in a statement.
"While acute malnutrition has not reached crisis levels, widespread chronic malnutrition and the poor diet ... mean that if there is any significant reduction in food intake the situation could deteriorate rapidly," it said.
The World Food Programme said government rations provided only about half of daily food needs and some families were being forced to cut down on the size and number of meals.
It said it would provide staple cereals and ingredients to enable local production of nutritious food such as corn-soy milk, rice-milk blend and nutrient-rich biscuits.
Three U.N. agencies visited the secretive communist state in February and March and reported that more than 6 million people needed food aid because of sharp falls in domestic production, adding to pressure for international food aid.
However, diplomatic efforts to resume full contacts between western countries and North Korea, which is technically still at war with South Korea, have been complicated by a stand-off over Pyongyang's nuclear programme.
http://af.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idAFTRE73S27620110429

POVERTY: North Korea plans to revitalise economy

Mark Willacy : Jan 16, 2011

North Korea has adopted a 10-year economic development plan, vowing to invest $100 billion in key sectors such as mining and agriculture.
The new economic plan also calls for the construction of thousands of kilometres of roads, the renovation of the rail network and the production of millions of tonnes of iron.
The closed communist state hopes to lure $100 billion in investment over the next decade.
A Chinese state company recently pumped $2 billion into establishing a free trade zone in the North.
But the impoverished communist state still suffers from chronic food shortages and economic paralysis.
The hermit kingdom relies heavily on aid, with malnutrition and economic stagnation plaguing the country.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/01/16/3113805.htm?section=justin

MALNUTRITION: WFP chief says child malnutrition widespread in N.Korea

 Oct 28, 2010 SEOUL — More than a third of children in some parts of North Korea suffer from malnutrition, the UN World Food Programme chief said Thursday before a visit to the North.
"We are deeply concerned about the situation in child malnourishment... in some areas 35 to 40 percent of children have no adequate vitamins or nutrients," WFP executive director Josette Sheeran said in Seoul.
She is on a two-day visit to South Korea and will fly on to China before going to the North from November 2 to 4.
A UN report last week warned North Korea is heading for a new food crisis, with drought and floods in various parts of the country exacerbated by cuts in international aid.
The UN Children's Fund has said that each year 40,000 children under five become "acutely malnourished".
International donations have dwindled amid irritation over the regime's missile and nuclear programmes, and Sheeran said the WFP has been forced to halve the size of its project there.
The organisation, which once provided nutritional supplements to children in more than 130 counties, is now operating in only 65 counties and reaching about 671,000 children, she said.
"The nutrition-focused programme that we have now (in the North) is 20 percent funded as it is... we have a 80 percent gap in funding," said Sheeran, warning that now is an "extremely difficult time for the world's hungry".
Sheeran, a former journalist who interviewed the North's founding president Kim Il-Sung in 1992, said it was not clear whether she would be allowed to meet his son and current leader Kim Jong-Il or other senior officials.
"We have not received an official schedule yet... we seek to meet at the highest level as we can with the government," she said.
North Korea suffered famine in the 1990s which killed hundreds of thousands of people and still relies on international aid from the WFP and others to help feed its population.
The United Nations predicts that Pyongyang will have to import 1.1 million tonnes of cereals this year. But UN agencies have raised only 20 percent of the 492 million dollars they estimated in 2009 would be needed for the North.
South Korea used to ship 400,000 tonnes of rice a year plus 300,000 tonnes of fertiliser to the North, but the shipments ended in 2008 as relations worsened between the two sides.
Tensions rose further this year after the South accused the North of torpedoing one of its warships, which Pyongyang denies.
A foreign ministry spokesman said Sheeran, during a meeting earlier Thursday with Foreign Minister Kim Sung-Hwan, did not press specifically for Seoul to help send aid to the North.
"She did not directly ask for aid for the WFP's operations in North Korea, saying she understands the political sensitivity of the issue," he told AFP.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5h73DVtnPhS8Y6sBtsWqbOA49r-cA?docId=CNG.c8806b0465005156c3ed4b83c649cb5d.1f1