Mick Hartley

While a jubilant Kim Jong-un pursues his obsession with nuclear technology, life for his wretched subjects is not so rosy:

Nearly 70 percent of the North Korean population, roughly seven in 10 people, is undernourished, a U.S. broadcaster reported Wednesday, citing a U.N. report on the need for humanitarian aid to North Korea.

According to the report released the previous day by the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), some 18 million North Korean people, including 1.3 million children under five, are malnourished because of the socialist country's poor state food rations which lack protein and fat, Radio Free Asia said.

The report also pointed out that the North's daily food rations remained at 300-380 grams per person on average last year, just half of some 600 grams that the United Nations recommends as the minimal daily requirement, the broadcaster said.

The report stressed the need for fresh assistance to the North, while reminding that North Korean residents suffer insufficiency in food, sanitation and drinking water because of recurring natural disasters like droughts and floods.

It ain't recurring natural disasters that cause the undernourishment of the North Koreans: it's the unnatural regime in Pyongyang. Aid to North Korea simply gets siphoned off to the military. It's been happening for years, and still the aid agencies don't get it. 

Joshua Stanton:

The aid agencies are still advocating the same failing strategy they’ve pursued for decades, which has hardly made a statistical dent in the percentage of undernourished North Koreans. The obvious cause of this, as the U.N. Panel of Experts recently reported, “This humanitarian situation is largely the result of priority being accorded to the military and defence industry, which has significantly distorted economic resource allocation.” (Para. 279.)

I’ve documented, for example, how North Korea squandered millions on its military on a mausoleum for Kim Il-sung while millions were starving of dying of opportunistic disease in the countryside. Or how it continues to spend six times on luxury imports what the U.N. World Food Program is asking foreign donors for each year. Or what spends to build luxury facilities like ski resorts, amusement parks, and 3D theaters for its elites. Or the billions it spends on missile development and testing, or nukes (for which we still have no estimates). Or Kim Jong-un’s affinity for yachts.

A more overlooked cause is the regime’s interference with private agriculture and markets that provide a substantial share of the food that most North Koreans survive on. Yet another is the fact that Pyongyang exports a substantial amount of the food it produces to raise cash for things that matter more to it than the nutrition of its people.

Meanwhile there are reports that the number of workers heading to Russia has increased sharply, with the old route through China being reopened – signs of the increasing desperation of Pyongyang to earn foreign currency:

A source close to North Korean affairs in China said that Russia is likely to welcome the plan by the North Korean authorities to dispatch a large labor force for foreign currency earning, noting, "The international community is keeping a watchful eye on North Korea's dispatch of workers abroad in order to block the nation's sources of foreign currency. But as long as Russia is in need of a cheap labor force, the regime can keep dispatching workers. The fact that they have resumed the old route [via Dandong] ten years after it was shut down shows the magnitude of the operation."

 A recent report by Radio Free Asia (RFA) lends further weight to these claims. RFA reported that according to statements made by the Russian Embassy in Pyongyang on March 20, Russia and China discussed the issue of dispatching workers during a joint working group meeting held on March 17 in Pyongyang. "These movements," the report read, "can be interpreted as part of a policy to increase the number of dispatched workers, despite negative sentiment from the international community." 

These workers, it should be remembered, work under conditions of virtual slave labour, under close supervision from Kim loyalists, with torture and execution awaiting those who try to escape.