Footage offers glimpse of N Korea hunger crisis

Updated

Occasionally the veil is pulled back from the secretive state of North Korea and the world gets a glimpse of what life is like there.

The latest snapshot is not good. New TV footage has revealed that North Korea is again facing failed harvests.

The footage shows young children already suffering from chronic hunger and disease. It is understood the state has slashed food rations to just 200 grams a day.

This footage was shot in North Korea's South Hwanghae province by Alert Net, the humanitarian news service run by the Reuters news agency.

One image shows children lying two to a bed. One toddler scratches obsessively at his face, his bedmate lies next to him motionless, a purple goo smeared on his face to treat a fungal infection.

While the visit was tightly controlled, Alert Net was permitted to interview selected North Koreans, like Jang Kum Son, a doctor at the province's main paediatric hospital.

"The natural disasters of last year and this year have forced the people to live on potatoes and corn," she said.

"People aren't taking in proper nutrition. In May our number of in-patients was about 200, since then we've had about 350 in-patients each month from July to September."

Accompanying the film crew was a team of nutrition experts from the aid group Doctors Without Borders.

At an orphanage in the province, 28 children huddled together on the floor waiting to be checked.

The doctors found 12 of them to be so malnourished that they warned the children could die without proper treatment.

"Because of the flooding, the children are suffering from diarrhoea and digestive problems," said Kim Chol Jun, a paediatrician at the orphanage.

"The flooding is the reason that the malnourished children are not recovering faster."

Outside it is clear just how devastating the flooding has been.

Pak Su Dong is the manager of one of the local cooperative farms.

Peeling back the leaves around a cob of corn, he reveals how the floods have stripped the crops of all their nutrients.

"We had heavy rain for two months from July, and that's why the maize couldn't receive enough nutrients to grow properly," he said.

"We now expect to harvest only 15 per cent of the maize output we had originally planned."

North Korea's decision to let the film crew to glimpse behind the bamboo curtain is a calculated attempt to attract food aid.

But just this week South Korea scrapped plans to send in emergency aid to the hermit kingdom, saying Pyongyang had failed to respond to its offer of assistance.

So yet again, the North Korean people are slowly starving.

Their hunger is a result of yet another bitter harvest as well as their own cruel and despotic regime in Pyongyang, and the tangled web of international politics.





Topics: poverty, community-and-society, disasters-and-accidents, floods, korea-democratic-peoples-republic-of

First posted