Mick Hartley

Here's Barbara Demick in the LA Times:

North Koreans who recently fled to China say many of their fellow citizens are losing faith in the regime of Kim Jong Il after a disastrous currency revaluation that wiped out savings and left food scarcer than at any time since the famine of the mid-1990s, when as many as 2 million people died.

"People are outspoken. They complain," said a 56-year-old woman from the border city of Musan who gave her name as Li Mi Hee.

Lowering her voice to a whisper, she said, "My son thinks that something might happen. I don't know what, but I can tell you this: People have opinions. . . . It is not like the 1990s when people just died without saying what they thought."

Li was one of several North Korean women from different parts of the country interviewed this month near the border with China. Using pseudonyms, as many North Koreans do even outside their country to protect family members from retaliation, they told of panic in the wake of the bungled economic move, which left even a staple such as rice in the hands of black marketeers and sent the communist government scrambling to repair the damage.

"The whole economic structure has collapsed because of the currency reform," said James Kim, a Korean American educator and president of the Yanbian University of Science and Technology in Yanji, China, who is in the process of setting up a similar school in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital. "It is a very difficult situation for them. . . . It might end up being worse than the 1990s."  […]

Food remains in such short supply that a single egg costs a full week's salary for many. Rice remains largely unavailable at state stores and can be purchased only illegally at about the equivalent of more than two weeks' salary.

One North Korean woman interviewed said common laborers under the new system were making about 2,500 won per month, barely more than $1 at the new exchange rates prevailing on the black market. Cooking oil is a luxury, so unaffordable that people buy only a few grams at a time in small plastic bags. 

Markets are said to have less than one-third of the merchandise they stocked before the reform.

I'm currently reading Demick's book "Nothing to Envy", where the focus is mainly on the 90s famine. She has some good lines:

North Koreans have multiple words for prison in much the same way the Inuit do for snow.

In a similar vein, Jane Macartney had a piece last Sunday in the Times: North Koreans fear the country is on the verge of a new famine.