NORTH KOREA: Prices are rising on the back of the country's experiments with capitalism after the collapse of its command economy, writes Clifford Coonan.
The collapse of North Korea's economy is driving food prices beyond the reach of millions of people there and malnutrition has become endemic in vast portions of the country, the United Nations food agency said.
Mr Richard Ragan, the World Food Programme's country director for North Korea said in an interview with The Irish Times that his agency had enough food to meet basic needs, but he warned that international assistance was still not enough to meet national demand.
"There is a food emergency in North Korea. The country does not produce enough food to feed the population," said Ragan, who is based in the North Korean capital Pyongyang.
A large percentage of North Korea's 23 million people remain hungry, although Ragan said at least the UN agency had enough food to provide assistance to the 6.5 million people considered most at risk in the secretive Stalinist state. That group includes pregnant women and nursing mothers, infants and old people.
"The pipeline of food looks good after some new shipments from Japan, the United States and Russia among other countries. At the moment, the WFP in North Korea is in pretty good shape," Ragan said.
The WFP is already working to line up foreign food aid for next year, he added. "We kind of live hand-to-mouth." This is a dramatic improvement from earlier in the year, when the agency was forced to cut food aid to more than four million people because donations from abroad were not forthcoming.
Meanwhile, the price for food is rising on the back of the country's experiments with capitalism following the collapse of its command economy, with a kilo of rice costing five times more today than this time last year.
"Prices are rising dramatically. We've seen prices of 700 won per kilo of rice and inflation is very quickly outpacing salaries," he said. The unofficial exchange rate for the won is around 2,200 to the euro, while a pensioner gets around 900 won a month, an industrial worker earns around 2,000 won and a white-collar worker 6,000 won.
"Some families are forced to spend as much as 80 per cent of their disposable income on food and that's a problem. Because they can't be supported by the state, they're doing other things and are being forced into the market sector. If they're successful, they'll be able to make money. There are winners and losers," he said.
The winners include people who are now allowed to make money, by binding brooms or making straw mats or selling charcoal, he said.
Many of the entrepreneurs are women who have presumably been laid off by money-losing government factories first, he said, the "unwilling beneficiaries of the market economy."
"We always ask people what they do, but we never heard a single North Korean woman list her occupation as housewife, but here's a new definition that's emerged," he said. The women described themselves as housewives to avoid using the word "jobless" to save face.
Many urban families can also earn extra income from small enterprises on the side but there are still millions of people who have no way to supplement their income.The urban poor, without access to land, are going hungry.
North Korea has suffered dire food shortages since at least 1995, when it first appealed for food aid after catastrophic floods compounded years of economic mismanagement and the loss of its main patron, the Soviet Union.
Donor fatigue has been exacerbated by North Korea's deep political isolation over its attempts to build nuclear weapons and by USsuspicions that food aid is diverted from the needy to the country's military and political elite.