More than a fourth of all North Korean children are stunted from chronic malnutrition, and two-thirds of the country’s 24 million people do not know where their next meal is coming from, the UN said on Friday.
The report illustrates a major domestic challenge for North Korea’s young leader, Kim Jong-un.
A team from the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), reporting from North Korea, found that 2.8 million North Koreans “are in need of regular food assistance amidst worrying levels of chronic malnutrition and food insecurity.”
It said 4 percent of North Korean children are acutely malnourished.
The report did not directly mention North Korea’s recent threats against South Korea, its threat of a pre-emptive nuclear strike against the US or Pyongyang’s claim to have abolished the Korean War armistice as of Monday.
However, the report said humanitarian aid should be neutral and impartial “and must not be contingent on political developments.”
The OCHA team also found that much of North Korea’s support structure is crumbling under the third generation of Kim family rule.
“Supplies of medicine and equipment are inadequate; water and heating systems need repair and the infrastructure of schools and colleges is deteriorating rapidly,” the report said.
With little arable land, harsh weather and chronic shortages of fuel and equipment, North Korea has struggled for decades to feed its 24 million people.
Its new leader, who took over in December 2011, has made improving the economy a priority and has pledged to improve North Koreans’ standards of living.
In autumn last year, a UN team visited all nine agricultural provinces of the communist state during the main cereal harvest and estimated that North Korea would need to import 507,000 tonnes of cereals to meet its basic food needs this year.
That UN team’s report recommended that North Korean farmers be allowed to sell or barter their surplus food at market, rather than turn their excess over to the state. Such incentives should encourage farmers to boost production, according to the joint report last year from the World Food Program and UN Food and Agriculture Organization.
However, the survey also made clear that the problems that have long kept North Koreans undernourished remain: insufficient and inefficient tractors and chronic shortages of fuel, spare parts and tires necessary to run them.
Agriculture is North Korea’s lifeblood, contributing a quarter of the nation’s economy and engaging a third of the population. However, many northern farms rely on ox and manual labor because there are not enough tractors and equipment to go around. Foreign food aid and imports make up for the shortfalls.
North Korea also suffered a severe famine in the mid and late 1990s.
When a hiker fell from a 55m waterfall in wild New Zealand bush, rescuers were forced to evacuate the badly hurt woman without her dog, which could not be found. After strangers raised thousands of dollars for a search, border collie Molly was flown to safety by a helicopter pilot who was determined to reunite the pet and the owner. A week earlier, an emergency rescue helicopter found the woman with bruises and lacerations after a fall at a rocky spot at the waterfall on the South Island’s West Coast. She was airlifted on March 24, but they were forced to
HIGH HOPES: The power source is expected to have a future, as it is not dependent on the weather or light, and could be useful for places with large desalination facilities A Japanese water plant is harnessing the natural process of osmosis to generate renewable energy that could one day become a common power source. The possibility of generating power from osmosis — when water molecules pass from a less salty solution to a more salty one — has long been known. However, actually generating energy from that has proved more complicated, in part due the difficulty of designing the membrane through which the molecules pass. Engineers in Fukuoka, Japan, and their private partners think they might have cracked it, and have opened what is only the world’s second osmotic power plant. It generates
Showcasing phallus-shaped portable shrines and pink penis candies, Japan’s annual fertility festival yesterday teemed with tourists, couples and families elated by its open display of sex. The spring Kanamara Matsuri near Tokyo features colorfully dressed worshipers carrying a trio of giant phallic-shaped objects as they parade through the street with glee. The festival, as legend has it, honors a local blacksmith in the Edo Period (1603-1868) who forged an iron dildo to break the teeth of a sharp-toothed demon inhabiting a woman’s vagina that had been castrating young men on their wedding nights. A 1m black steel phallus sits in the courtyard of
JAN. 1 CLAUSE: As military service is voluntary, applications for permission to stay abroad for over three months for men up to age 45 must, in principle, be granted A little-noticed clause in sweeping changes to Germany’s military service policy has triggered an uproar after it emerged that the law requires men aged up to 45 to get permission from the armed forces before any significant stay abroad, even in peacetime. The legislation, which went into effect on Jan. 1 aims to bolster the military and demands all 18-year-old men fill out a questionnaire to gauge their suitability to serve in the armed forces, but stops short of conscription. If the “modernized” model fails to pull in enough recruits, parliament will be compelled to discuss the reintroduction of compulsory service, German
RSS