Chronic food shortage shows despite efforts by N. Korea to hide it

NAMPO, North Korea - Along the sides of the road, people comb through the grass looking for edible weeds. In the center of town, a boy about 9 years old wears a tattered army jacket hanging below his knees. He has no shoes.

Sprawled on the lawn outside a bath house, poorly dressed people lie on the grass, either with no place better to go or no energy to do so at 10 a.m. on a weekday.

Despite efforts to keep North Korea's extreme poverty out of view, a glance around the countryside shows a population in distress. At the heart of the problem is a chronic food shortage, the result of inflation, strained relations with neighboring countries, and years of flooding.

Aid agencies say the level of hunger is not at the point it was in the 1990s when it was defined as a famine, although they have found a few cases of children suffering from "kwashiorkor" - the swollen belly syndrome associated with starvation. Mostly what they are seeing is a kind of collective apathy - the kind of listlessness shown by the people on the streets of Nampo.

"Teachers report that children lack energy and are lagging in social and cognitive development. Workers are unable to put in full days and take longer to complete tasks - which has implications for the success of the early and main harvests," a group of five US humanitarian agencies reported in a summer assessment of the food situation.

Aid workers get reports from hospitals of increasing infant mortality and declining birth weights of newborns. They also said they were seeing 20 percent to 40 percent more patients with digestive disorders caused largely by poor nutrition.

The UN World Food Program reached similar conclusions. In a recent survey of 375 North Korean households, more than 70 percent of North Koreans were found to be supplementing their diet with weeds and grasses foraged from the countryside. Such wild foods are difficult to digest, especially for children and the elderly.

The survey also determined that most adults had started skipping lunch, reducing their diet to two meals a day to cope with the food shortage.

These are some of the same signs that augured the mid-1990s famine that killed as many as 2 million people, 10 percent of the population.

"The current situation hasn't reached the famine proportions that it did during the 1990s. Our hope and goal is to keep it from going over the precipice," said Nancy Lindborg, president of Mercy Corps, one of the US aid organizations working inside North Korea. "You have a number of factors that have conspired to create a really tough food situation."

In the capital city of Pyongyang, which is reserved for the most politically loyal North Koreans, plenty of food is available for sale. A grocery inside the Rakwon Department Store carries Fruit Loops and frozen beef. At open-air markets, you can find mangos, kiwis, and pineapple.

But the products are far too expensive for most North Koreans, whose official salaries are less than $1 per month - 60 cents to 75 cents monthly for the workers surveyed by the World Food Program. And the farther you get from Pyongyang, the poorer the people.

Nampo is 25 miles southwest of the capital, on the Yellow Sea. It used to be a thriving port city, but nowadays its harbor is used mostly for shipments of humanitarian aid. On a weekday morning, many people sit along the sidewalk watching the few cars pass. They appear to be unemployed or homeless.

The shoeless child walked through the center of town across the street from the flashiest building in town - a pink edifice with a triangular roof that houses an exhibit of "Kimjongilia," a special breed of begonia named for North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. A parking lot next to the main department store is carpeted a golden yellow from corn that has been laid out to dry.

Every available patch of land appears dedicated to the production of food. Irregular-shaped plots encircled by highway exits, even slivers sloping between houses and the road at 45 degree angles, are planted with vegetables.

Much of the population has been enlisted in producing food. On a Friday morning at rush hour, the sides of the road out of Pyongyang were lined with office workers marching out to the countryside to help with the harvest. Many were middle-age women with pocketbooks and clothing that made them look like they were off to a business meeting, except for the fact that some carried shovels.

The food shortage is not from a lack of effort so much as a dearth of proper equipment and fertilizer, combined with the naturally harsh climate and terrain of the countryside. Much of the rice crop is lost because the collective farms are using threshing machines dating to the 1960s and 1970s.

North Korea's souring relationship with South Korea is a major problem.

The conservative new government in Seoul, the southern capital, this year withheld a planned shipment of 300,000 tons of fertilizer. Moreover, prices for fertilizer on the private market have skyrocketed.