Hungry, and getting desperate: printer friendly version Hungry, and getting desperate Tony Banbury International Herald Tribune TUESDAY, JUNE 14, 2005 BANGKOK On a recent visit to North Korea, I was welcomed into a modest apartment by a family in Huichon city, Chagang Province. Its four members lived on a diet of government-supplied corn and acorns foraged in nearby woodland. Relatives in the countryside sometimes sent small quantities of beans, but there were none in stock. Meat, eggs, fresh vegetables and fruit were the rarest of luxuries, usually available only on major national holidays, like President Kim Jong Il's recent birthday. This was subsistence at its most basic - and stoic. The woman who welcomed us into her home, as the mother of a newborn, was entitled to a World Food Program ration designed to meet most of her calorie needs and spare her baby the chronic malnutrition that afflicts one in three North Korean children. Her 4-year old daughter, enrolled at a nearby nursery, was supposed to receive similarly nourishing WFP assistance. But WFP had been forced to suspend its support three months earlier, after the government decreed that the UN agency's staff could not visit Chagang to monitor aid distributions. With the nursery no longer receiving WFP food, the mother had withdrawn her child from the school. Many in the city and in neighboring counties were finding it much harder to get by without the agency's help, local officials admitted, insisting they could do nothing to make up for the shortfall. Like the country as a whole, remote, mountainous Chagang cannot produce nearly enough to feed its population. The government ban on WFP monitors was lifted shortly before my visit, prompting a speedy resumption of food aid to the province's "accessible" areas. The little girl was soon back at the nursery. But not for long. Since my late-March visit, North Korea's precarious food situation has deteriorated alarmingly. The country is now bracing for a violent storm that threatens to plunge it into its most severe humanitarian crisis since the one that claimed countless lives in the mid-1990s. The tempest gathering in North Korea is the product of three different fronts converging at the same time in the same place. Their convergence has the makings of a terrible catastrophe. First, there is an acute scarcity of domestic food supplies. It is the lean season in North Korea; stocks from last year's harvests are running out faster than usual, and this year's crops won't be in for at least three months. In January, the government's distribution system cut the daily ration it provides to the 17 million people living in urban areas from 300 grams per person to 250 grams - about 40 percent of the internationally recommended minimum. Officials say another cut could come soon. Second, economic reforms dating from July 2002 improved the lot of a few - mainly traders and businessmen - but made life much harder for millions of others. Food prices have risen steeply, and salaries and pensions have dropped. In the past 12 months, the price of rice has tripled and that of corn has quadrupled. The average monthly wage of an urban worker - equivalent to about 1 euro - now buys less than four kilograms of corn, the cheapest cereal. If a family chooses to spend their income on those four kilograms of corn, they have nothing remaining to spend on anything else. Third, WFP is running out of donations. We have already been forced to cut vital distributions to many of the 6.5 million North Koreans dependent on our assistance. And there is worse to come. Cuts will continue over the coming months until by August we will have stopped providing aid to 80 percent of all our beneficiaries. Imagine the quiet hunger pangs of the family in Huichon. Now multiply that corrosive pain a million-fold. Until recently, WFP was able to prevent millions of North Korean children, women and elderly pensioners from going to bed hungry. Now, desperate North Korean parents are consumed with worry about where their children's next meal will come from. To ensure international food aid reaches the intended recipients, the World Food Program has been working relentlessly for years to put in place an effective monitoring system. The North Korean government has not been as cooperative as we wish, and WFP has repeatedly appealed to it to do more. Despite the difficulties, WFP has put in place over the past few months a new monitoring system that, if fully implemented as we now expect, should give us the best monitoring capability any international organization has ever had in North Korea. What we urgently need now are the donations to make it work. We are still in time to throw a lifeline to the 6.5 million women, children and elderly people of North Korea. (Tony Banbury is the UN World Food Program's regional director for Asia.) Copyright © 2005 The International Herald Tribune | www.iht.com