Dateline ACT

How to survive on a hundred grams a day

Nils Carstensen, Pyongyang, June 1997

With food rations at an all times low, North Korea shows signs of a country about to be engulfed by mass starvation.

As the train pulls into Sinuiju station, it passes a set of empty wagons. On the black soil between the heavy, grey metal wheels and at the still open wagon doors a dozen or so children are busy searching for small, bright yellow pearls of single maize grains.

A rail road worker spots the foreigners in the passing passenger train and hurries over to scatter the children with angry shouts. The kids, dressed in layer upon layer of worn out rags quickly dive under the wagons and disappears from sights.

Thus presents the hunger in North Korea itself to a visiting foreigner. One minute its there, spelled out before your eyes, only to vanish again before you can get the details sorted out or focus a camera.

100 grams per dayThe figures about the food crisis in North Korea are not phantoms, though. Even when you take into account the already substantial food aid delivered to or pledged for North Korea in 1997, there remains a shortfall of at least one million metric tons (MT) up to the next rice crop can be harvested in October-November.

This figure is confirmed by both the North Korean authorities and the World Food Programme's (WFP) Country Director in Pyongyang, Brigitta Karlgren.

I would put the hunger situation around 3.5 on a scale of 1 to 5," explains Mrs. Karlgren. But if we and the North Koreans are not able to find further funds and food, we could see the crisis be closer to 4.5 on that same scale very soon."

ACT International, a worldwide network of agencies and churches working with emergency aid, had a team in North Korea the first days of June. This writer followed the ACT team as it visited distribution centers, nurseries, kindergartens, hospitals and cooperative farms around the capital Pyongyang and in and around the border town of Sinuiju far north at the Korean border with China.

Every where the team asked, ordinary people have for several month now been supplied with food rations of only 100 grams of rice, wheat flour or maize which they then try to supplement with home grown or purchased vegetables, cabbage, edible grass or roots. Minimum food rations in most refugee camps in the world are around 600 grams.

Flood damage and a stagnating economySinuiju is a city of some 330.000 inhabitants. With large irrigated plains along the Yalu River on the border with China, a busy rail road hub for passengers and freight to and from China and with a number of factories for consumer goods, Sinuiju and its surroundings used to be a developed and industrious region.

In 1995 and again in 1996 heavy rains in both North Korea and China prompted the Yalu River to rise to hitherto never seen levels resulting in devastating floods. In the city flood water reached up to the second floor of the grey apartment blocks where most workers and officials live.

In surrounding villages the one storey clay, brick and tile houses of the cooperative farms were completely submerged. Up to 2/3 of the arable land was flooded and an equivalent amount of the 1995 harvest was lost. Before repairs and rehabilitation had been anywhere near completed floods in 1996 added to the damage.

The combined effect of two years of flooding in Sinuiju reduced the 1996 rice harvest from a planned 40.800 MT to a meagre 9.220 MT. Including food aid this harvest left the city authorities in January 1997 facing a situation with just enough rice to feed the entire city rations of 450 grams per person per day - but for three months only and nothing for the rest of the year. Instead rations were cut to about 100 grams stretching such insufficient rations up to October 1977. That, along with an encouragement to engage in barter trade with Chinese traders, is all the city now has to offer 330.000 citizens.

But as industrial production in Sinuiju, as else where in North Korea, has been greatly reduced, there is little but herbal roots, logs, dried fish and scrap metal to barter with the Chinese. The industrial plants in Sinuiju stand empty not so much because of flood damages but for lack of foreign currency to import crucial raw materials and fuel for transport.

Sinuiju was home for a big factory producing China Shoes" in North Korea. The shoes are made of a cotton-canvas upper part on a rubber sole. But there is no longer money to import rubber from Malaysia and thus no more shoes are being produced in Sinuiju. Some plants, which not only lack important raw materials but also essential spare parts or others which are completely outdated from a technical point of view, are now being bartered with China as scrap metal in exchange for food in what looks like a huried one-off sell out" to cover for North Korea's food and foreign currency deficits. Deficits rising out of the dual devastating effects of the 1995-96 floods and, not least, the disappearence of North Korea's trading partners in the Communist block of the Cold War.

Underweight childrenThe Chong Son District's nursery and kindergarten is housed in a two storey concrete building on a muddy street in the middle of Sinuiju. As in kindergartens, nurseries and schools across the country there are special study rooms with paintings, pictures and texts about the unrivalled achievements of the deceased Great Leader" Kim Il Sung as well as about his son, the Dear Leader" Kim Jong Il who since his fathers death in 1994 seems to have taken over the ultimate command of North Korea.

Although old fashioned the Chong Son kindergarten comes across as well organized, clean and full of the echoing cries, songs and clattering up and down stairs of about 220 children. Many of the children may seem pale and lean, but at least to the untrained eye, there are no explicit cases of sever hunger among these children.

But a look at the kindergarten's log" of the children's weight and heights though, tells a story of signs of widespread undernourishment. In average the 5 to 7 year old weight about 2 - 3 kg less than normal for their age. The average height of the same age group is recorded to be 2 cm below what would be expected in normal years. The kindergarten's headmaster, an extremely shy woman in her forties, explains that the children have unusual difficulties concentrating during play and lessons.

A defunct hospitalAnother slab of concrete two streets away constitutes the referral hospital for 800.000 children in the entire North Pyongyang Province. The hospital has 220 beds but there are only patients in 30 of the beds. One of the patients is 1 1/2 year old Kim Hyon who has been admitted for malnourishment and a complicating chest infection. Like the kids in the kindergarten Kim is about 2 kg underweight but with only 1 1/2 years and equivalent body weight that constitues a serious case of malnutrition, as his skinny body and far too dominating dark eyes clearly illustrates.

But as with the vanishing group of children picking grains at the train station, the details of Kim's story or some explanations as to why a children's hospital, in the midst of a hunger crisis, is near empty, elapses this writer as the entire ACT Team is quickly whisked out of the hospital and back down to the waiting entourage of cars, guides, interpreters and local officials. As the cars turn around and start moving away from the hospital, Kim Hyon's fragile outline can be glimpsed through a dirty window on the second floor.

A call to UNICEF's Responsible Program Officer, Mr. Runar Sorensen, in Pyongyang throws a little more light on the situation of North Korea's children. He and his staff have done numerous visits to nurseries, kindergartens and children's hospital in many parts of the country.

Every where we go, we find extensive mal- and under nourishment," Mr Sorensen says, even including numerous severe and extreme cases. In just one hospital in Kangwon Province we came across 60 to 70 such severe cases. And on top of the hunger crisis we have bit by bit realized a very serious crisis, if not collapse, in the public health sector. One reason you find so few patients in the hospitals are that the hospitals have little or often nothing at all to offer the patients in terms of medicine and food."

As a consequence of these findings both WFP and UNICEF are now targeting children's institutions including hospitals in their food distributions. UNICEF has also decided to put much greater emphasis on the health sector including providing some selected basic medicines.

A Korean puzzleWhy, given the obviously severe food shortages, do you not see more starving people in the streets and towns of North Korea? Where are the pictures like those from Somalia in 1992 or Ethiopia in 1985? Food availability in North Korea is now probably lower than during the great Ethiopian famine and yet the ACT team did came only across individual cases of explicit malnutrition.

One explanation lies with the Public Distribution System in North Korea. It ensures a quicker and more equal distribution of what little food is available, than you find in most famine situations elsewhere in the world. All major aid agencies collaborates and coordinate their food donations through this system, including for instance 2.000 MT of rice from ACT International arrived in North Korea in late April and had long been distributed when the ACT Team visited North Korea.

Another explanation for the lack of hunger pictures" are offered by a senior person in the North Korean Foreign Ministry.

"Our people will never present themselves to the world like the famine victims in Africa," he says and goes on to explain, "There are people starving and we have said earlier than more than 100 children died of hunger in 1996. This year the situation is worse and more people are suffering. But you will not find them begging in the streets for the benefit of your cameras. Our people will never do that. Those worst affected you will find in hospitals or at home where we try to take care of them, with whatever we have. Should there be anything wrong with that?"

Lastly and maybe most importantly, the access of foreign journalists and camera crews to North Korea in general is extremely restricted and so far no news teams have been given a freehand to look into the famine in North Korea

Border cannibalsLacking access to North Korea some Western journalists, many of them based on the Chinese side of the border just across from Sinuiju, have found themselves forced to base their stories on information from local travellers and traders crossing from Korea into China. Their reports have indicated a situation so desperate that people in remoter villages in parts of North Korea have taken up cannibalistic practices as well as offering their young daughters for sex for food" along the roadside in the mountains.

Since the war (1950 - 53) between North and South Korea, this Peninsula has been fertile ground for many a false rumour or gross exaggerations of originally more humble facts. The hunger crisis in North Korea seems to be no exception. Although all the foreign observers this writer spoke to in North Korea, acknowledge the seriousness of the hunger situation in the country, none of them seemed to believe in the "cannibalism stories" even though they have been quoted in several usually "serious" and reliable Western newspapers.

And although the regime in North Korea may qualify as one of the most restrictive and tyranic regimes around, foreign observers in North Korea see most of these stories as sensationalistic journalism based on second or third hand stories bought for good dollars from local travellers, traders and truck drivers who may have been quick to figure out what kind of stories pay best.

Taking a Sunday afternoon stroll down the Pyongyang promenade along the Taedong River, the passing by North Korean families, teenagers, grand fathers, bicyclist and even the ever present but unarmed (at least in Pyongyang) men in brown military uniforms, do not come across as your average child eater. Rather they look like people who would have enjoyed an ice cream with their kids - had there only been any ice cream left in North Korea.

Taking a similar look around the park and nearby rail road station in Sinuiju, the relative "luxury" of Pyongyang is striking in comparison to the stripped down, naked harshness of life in Sinuiju. In Pyongyang the lights in many street lamps may be turned off to save electricity. In Sinuiju, a city of 330.000 people, there are few street lamps at all. And none seem to be working.

But what really stands out in Sinuiju are small family groups, mothers with one or two children, huddling together with just a piece of plastic for cover during a morning long down pour. Their canvas shoes are worn out, soaked through and in a process of slow disintegration. With them the women carry what looks like some few belongings brought along on a long trek searching for food in the city.

Had one not known that it is forbidden, and reported to be impossible, to break up from your homestead in North Korea, this writer would be prepared to bet his last overrated North Korean Won, that these wet-cold-and-to-the-bone-hungry families, along with the grain picking kids between the rail road tracks above the park, are destitute families displaced by famine.

The question remains of course whether these maybe 75 or 100 people are just exceptions from the rule of orderly, disciplined one-for-all and all-for-one carpet hunger" through out North Korea? Or whether these groups and kids are the first expressions of a severe famine further inland. A rare glimpse of a speculated distaster hidden in the hazy drizzle that shrouds the districts further into the mountains?

Which ever way, these small family groups huddling under their pieces of plastic still do not look like people who eat children - even during a famine. What they do look like, are people desperately in need of food, shelter and medical care.