Fears Of North Korean Famine Mount

YANJI, China — Before slipping across a frozen river from North Korea last year, Jin measured time in kernels of grain: The few pounds of donated U.N. rice he received each month, the small bag of ground corn he bought with earnings from factory work, and the two tiny servings of porridge he ate each day to make the food last.

"We were always hungry," said Jin, who gave only his surname because he plans to return to North Korea and fears imprisonment if he is caught.

"If we don't get aid, we will starve," he said in Yanji, a bustling Chinese city on North Korea's northern border.

Because impoverished North Korea is the world's most isolated nation, information about the welfare of its 23 million people is limited.

But interviews with experts, refugees and several Chinese who recently traveled to North Korea suggest that malnutrition and occasional starvation have increased in the wake of its missile and nuclear tests last summer and fall.

Foreign governments cut humanitarian aid to the rogue nation and experts warn that North Koreans could suffer a famine if assistance is not restored this year.

In a diplomatic breakthrough last month with the United States and four other countries, North Korea promised to begin dismantling its nuclear facilities in exchange for normalized relations with Washington.

Diplomats continue to work out the details, and the general agreement is promising for hungry North Koreans.

But if relief doesn't come soon, millions of North Koreans are at risk of serious malnutrition, said Jean-Pierre de Margerie, director of the U.N. World Food Program office in Pyongyang, North Korea's capital.

Pregnant and nursing mothers, the elderly and young children are particularly threatened, experts said.

North Korea's reclusive leaders are responsible for the hardship. Since Kim Il Sung took control of the nation at the end of the Korean War in 1953, he and his son Kim Jong Il, today's leader, have isolated it from the world. To prevent dissent, they stopped almost all information from entering North Korea and used much of the nation's tattered economy to build its military and to crush resistance.

Possibly in fear of losing control, Kim Jong Il ordered the United Nations to shift from delivering aid to development work in 2005, and the WFP cut its program size by three quarters.

Even as North Koreans suffered, Kim also spent lavishly on himself and a select elite. Besides expensive cars, thousands of movies, and wide-screen TVs, Kim reportedly spends nearly $1 million each year on imported cognac.

The combination of bad governance, reduced aid and a poor harvest last year have pushed North Korea toward famine.

Partly because of funding cuts, the WFP delivered 15,000 tons of food aid to North Korea last year, down from 1 million tons in 2001. The U.N. agency's budget for North Korea has received only 18 percent of required funds for the current budget cycle, the lowest level of funding for this time of year since 1997, de Margerie said.

"When the political situation is tense and not harmonious ... it doesn't create a conducive environment for donors to come forward to pledge support, even if it's purely humanitarian," he said in a telephone interview from Pyongyang.

Bilateral aid has also plummeted: Food shipments from China and South Korea – in 2005 North Korea's top food donors – plunged last year.

The United States cut all food assistance to North Korea in 2005 because officials suspected that food was being given to the military or sold on the black market, a State Department spokesman said.

While American policy is "to separate food aid from policy issues, we must insist on minimum international standards for monitoring and for distribution, in order to ensure reasonably that it reaches those for whom it is intended," Jay Lefkowitz, the Bush administration's special envoy for human rights in North Korea, told lawmakers this month.

Before the six-nation talks in Beijing last month, Washington used the possibility of increased food aid "as one of the goodies that the U.S. could provide to North Korea," said Peter Beck, a North Korea analyst with the non-profit International Crisis Group.

As part of the diplomatic thaw, South Korea said it would restart shipments of rice across the heavily fortified border if Pyongyang takes steps as promised to dismantle its nuclear facilities.

"Generally governments say humanitarian aid is not connected with politics, but actually they do connect them," said Kwon Tae Jin, a South Korean government researcher based in Seoul.

The debate over aid aside, the growing difficulties in North Korea have spurred increasing numbers to cross illegally into China, despite that China considers refugees to be economic migrants and turns them over to North Korea officials, who often imprison the refugees in appalling conditions, Jin and several Yanji residents said.

In Hoeryong, a city of some 170,000 people where Jin, 49, and his family live, food and fuel are scarce.

The government stopped distributing food last summer and citizens now primarily rely on aid, said Jin, who left Hoeryong in November in search of work in China.

The number of homeless — in North Korean called kotchebi, or swallows — has grown as people sell their homes to buy food. Many homeless in Hoeryong "are listless and have distended bellies," Jin said.

Jin, his wife and two daughters survived on two meals each day. Generally, they would wake at 5 a.m. and eat small bowls of corn porridge in the two-room apartment they shared. There was rarely electricity or heat in the city, and most of the buses have stopped running, he said.

After breakfast Jin walked to the factory where he worked on an assembly line producing bean paste, earning the equivalent of about $1 a month.

Before he left in the fall, the government had distributed 5-pound bags of rice marked with U.N. labels to most adults each month, and because rice is more valuable than corn, Jin was able to trade it for low-quality corn and sometimes a few potatoes.

Stretched over a month between four people, there was barely enough to survive, he said.

To supplement their diet, many residents have started to grow crops outside of the city or to raise livestock for sale at the city's market, activities once forbidden by North Korea's communist government but now generally overlooked.

But the gains have done little to improve nutrition.

Comparing 7-year-old boys in North and South Korea, the boy in the north is 8 inches shorter, weighs 20 pounds less and on average will live 10 fewer years, de Margerie said, adding that 6 million North Koreans — one quarter of the population — is "chronically undernourished."

When Jin arrived in Yanji he was shocked by how prosperous the city is, even though he had heard that China is richer than North Korea.

The sight of Yanji's markets and tall buildings shook his faith in the North Korean government.

"We want to become more free and open. But the government doesn't listen to us," he said quietly.

"We don't understand politics," he said. "We only want to be able to eat."