Last year, North Korea recorded its worst harvest in more than a decade, the UN said yesterday, as natural disasters combined with the nation’s lack of arable land and inefficient agriculture to hit production.
North Korea, which is under several sets of sanctions over its nuclear weapon and ballistic missile programs, has long struggled to feed itself and suffers chronic food shortages.
However, last year’s harvest was just 4.95 million tonnes, the UN said in its Needs and Priorities assessment for this year, down by 500,000 tonnes.
Photo: AFP
It was “the lowest production in more than a decade,” UN resident coordinator in North Korea Tapan Mishra said in a statement. “This has resulted in a significant food gap.”
As a result, 10.9 million North Koreans need humanitarian assistance — 600,000 more than last year — with the potential for increased malnutrition and illness.
It is equivalent to 43 percent of the population.
However, while the number of people needing help rose, the UN has had to cut its target for people to help — from 6 million to 3.8 million — as it seeks to prioritize those most in need.
Funding has fallen far short of what the UN says it needs.
Only 24 percent of last year’s appeal was met, with Mishra describing it as “one of the lowest-funded humanitarian plans in the world.”
Agencies have been forced to scale back their programs and some face closing projects, he said, appealing to donors to “not let political considerations get in the way of addressing humanitarian need.”
“The human cost of our inability to respond is unmeasurable,” he said, adding that sanctions have created unintended delays and challenges to humanitarian programs, even though they are exempt under UN Security Council resolutions.
Impoverished North Korea has frequently been condemned by the international community for decades of prioritizing the military and its nuclear weapons program over adequately providing for its people — an imbalance that some critics have said the UN’s aid program encourages.
Ahead of his Hanoi summit last week with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, US President Donald Trump repeatedly dangled the prospect of North Korea becoming an economic powerhouse if it gave up its arsenal, but the two were unable to reach a deal.
The nation industrialized rapidly following the end of the Korean War and for a time was wealthier than South Korea. Funding from Moscow papered over the effects of chronic economic mismanagement, but that came to an end with the collapse of the Soviet Union, which was followed by a crippling famine.
That episode — known as the Arduous March, when hundreds of thousands of people died — is in the past, but North Korea does not have access to the latest agricultural technology or fertilizers, and its yields are well below global averages.
It is also a rugged, largely mountainous, nation with only about 20 percent of its land area suitable for cultivation. It was hit by a heatwave in July and August last year, followed by heavy rains and flash floods from Typhoon Soulik.
As a result, rice and wheat crops were down 12 to 14 percent, the UN said.
The figure is significantly larger than in South Korea, where rice production was down only 2.6 percent last year, according to Seoul’s statistics, even though it experiences similar weather and climate.
North Korea’s soybean output slumped 39 percent and production of potatoes — promoted by Kim as a way to increase supplies — was down 34 percent, the UN said.
Last month, Pyongyang told the UN that it was facing a shortfall of 1.4 million tonnes of food this year.
Humanitarian agencies were able to monitor their programs “rigorously” to make sure that help reached the most vulnerable people, Mishra said.
“We cannot just leave them behind,” he added.
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
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
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
Hundreds of Filipinos and tourists flocked to a sun-bleached field north of Manila yesterday, on Good Friday, to witness one of the country’s most blood-soaked displays of religious fervor, undeterred by rising fuel prices. Scores of bare-chested flagellants with covered faces walked barefoot through the dusty streets of Pampanga Province’s San Fernando as they flogged their backs with bamboo whips in the scorching heat. Agence France-Presse (AFP) journalists said they saw devotees deliberately puncturing their skin with glass shards attached to a small wooden paddle to ensure their bleeding during the ritual, a way to atone for sins and seek miracles from
RSS