[KS] 121098nkorea-food.html

[Stephen Epstein]

Dear list members,

I'd like to direct your attention to the following article, which contains
the most compelling and cogent account I've yet seen about the situation in
the DPRK.  The piece is long, so I'm just noting the link along with the
first several paragraphs to give an idea of what the article has to say.

For the full version, see:

http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/asia/121098nkorea-food.html

Stephen


      December 10, 1998


In North Korean Hunger, Legacy Is Stunted Children


      By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

     BEIJING -- More than five years of severe food shortages and a
     near-total breakdown in the public health system have led to
     devastating malnutrition in North Korea and probably left an entire
     generation of children physically and mentally impaired, a new
     study by international aid groups has found.

     The study, the first scientific nutritional survey in North Korea,
     confirms the disturbing reports of international aid workers, who
     in the last year have gained increasing access to the population of
     the highly isolated and secretive country.

     Among other findings, researchers from the World Food Program,
     Unicef and the European Union found that, because of long-term food
     shortages, a staggering 62 percent of children under 7 years old
     suffer from stunted growth.

     They have discovered that despite a huge international food aid
     program in the last three years, severe malnutrition is still
     widespread among toddlers. At crucial stages of brain development,
     this generation's physical and mental abilities will not develop
     normally and can never rebound.

     Separately, international medical workers from groups like the Red
     Cross have begun to document how the effects of food shortages are
     being severely compounded by a breakdown in public health services.
     Even basic water purification systems stand idle for lack of
     essential ingredients like chlorine, Red Cross workers say, leaving
     vast numbers of people with such severe diarrhea that they are
     unable to absorb completely what little food they have.

     Recently, an increasingly clear and saddening picture of the hungry
     life of North Korea's 23 million people has come into focus, as the
     Government has slowly, often begrudgingly, granted increased access
     to international aid groups, leading to the recent formal study as
     well as more informal surveys and observations by foreign aid
     agencies. Past assessments of the magnitude of the disaster are
     considered flawed because they were based on interviews with a
     small number of North Korean refugees who had fled into China.

     And while the researchers and aid workers on the ground in North
     Korea have not seen evidence of cannibalism or starving children
     dying by the roadside, as has been described in the more lurid
     refugee reports, what they did find was in many ways equally
     disturbing: A population withering after nearly a decade of chronic
     hunger, people so weakened by malnutrition that colds and stomach
     flus quickly turn lethal, the future of a generation irretrievably
     lost.

     "Now at last we have hard facts -- the situation is very grave,"
     said Judith Cheng-Hopkins, regional director for Asia of the United
     Nations World Food Program, which has taken part in the research.
     "To me this is a famine in slow motion. People cope year after
     year, and probably a lot drop off. But the totality is very hard to
     gauge."

     Providing the most solid data on the crisis to date, research teams
     led by foreign scientists fanned out across North Korea for three
     weeks this fall to conduct the first random sample nutritional
     survey, looking at 1,800 children. They found that 62 percent of
     children under 7 had stunted growth, a symptom of long-term
     malnutrition. Thirty percent of children between 1 and 2 suffered
     from moderate to severe malnutrition. This has a high likelihood of
     impairing mental and physical development, because the nervous
     system matures dramatically during this essential first year.






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