World Food Program Claims Food Shortage Possible for North Korea
|Here we go again with yet another North Korea doesn’t have enough food story so lets give them free money:
SEOUL — As North Korea heads toward the “barley hump” – the lean season before the rice and corn harvest in the summer – aid agencies are warning that an unusually dry winter is compounding chronic food shortages in the impoverished country.
And while North Korea may no longer be in a state of famine, malnutrition remains such a widespread problem that even slight changes in weather can have an outsized impact on ordinary people’s food supply.
“We’re concerned about seed scarcity and the low level rain and snowfall,” John Aylieff, deputy Asia director at the U.N.’s World Food Program, said from Pyongyang. “All of these things are raising concerns about the winter harvest this year.”
Winter crops – including wheat and barley – should be growing now, but after an exceptionally dry year in 2014, rainfall around the country has been markedly lower than usual so far this year, particularly in the “cereal bowl” provinces of Pyongan in the west and Hwanghae in the south.
Although the winter harvest makes up only 5 percent of North Korea’s domestic food supply, it is a critical time because the crops see the country through the lean season known locally as the barley hump – the period between May and August before rice and corn crops are harvested. [Washington Post]
You can read more at the link, but for a country that supposedly can’t afford its own food they sure do find ways to pay to develop plenty of new missiles and submarines. Why should the world be forced to subsidize these military programs by buying food for the Kim regime?
Sucks being them…
It could be argued –I’m sure it has before- that the world is subsidizing the Kim regime via food aid.
How many famines could they go through and still maintain control over the general population or not have one of the rivaling factions within the government/party step in and take over through a coup?
Maybe that’s scarier to the world than the current situation.
Dancing with the doooshbag you know rather than the one you don’t.