North Korea again runs the risk of outright famine, ten years after up to one million of its people died of starvation, a leading United States research institute said on Wednesday.
”The country is in its most precarious situation since the end of the famine a decade ago,” said Peterson Institute senior fellow Marcus Noland.
The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) has also warned that time is running out to avert a humanitarian tragedy due to acute and worsening food shortages.
The Peterson Institute in a statement said food prices in the hardline communist state have almost tripled in the last year.
”Anecdotal reports describe a breakdown in institutions and increasingly repressive internal behaviour,” it said.
Noland and fellow researcher Stephan Haggard of the University of California, San Diego, forecast that the regime would weather the challenge politically ”by ratcheting up repression and scrambling, albeit belatedly, for foreign assistance”.
The pair, North Korea specialists, said the country’s persistent food crisis poses difficult ethical choices.
”North Korea is critically dependent on food aid but the government has recklessly soured its relations with the donor community. Yet in the absence of vigorous international action, the victims of this disaster will not be the culpable but the innocent,” the statement said.
The institute said it may already be too late to avoid some deaths from hunger. Shortages of crucial agricultural inputs such as fertiliser were setting the stage for continuing problems well into next year.
South Korea, apart from being the largest donor to the current WFP programme, in recent years has also provided around 400 000 tonnes of rice and 300 000 tonnes of fertiliser annually in bilateral aid.
But Pyongyang has so far not asked Seoul for the aid amid rising cross-border tensions. It is angry at the new Seoul government’s policy of linking economic assistance — but not humanitarian aid — to denuclearisation.
The institute estimates that the famine of the mid to late 1990s killed up to one million people, or about 5% of the population.
The North since then has relied on international aid to help feed its people but in 2006 ordered the WFP drastically to reduce its programme following two good harvests.
The Washington-based think-tank, which has surveyed more than 1 300 refugees, said the 1990s famine had badly tarnished the regime’s image.
It also said a significant number of refugees were unaware of the international humanitarian aid, and the ones who knew of it ”almost universally did not believe that they were beneficiaries”. – Sapa-AFP