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| STARVATION IN N. KOREA
JUNE 11, 1997TRANSCRIPT |
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N. Korea used to be able to feed its 23 million people. But the country's economy has suffered setbacks in the past decade, and relief groups are warning mass starvation may be imminent.
A RealAudio version of this NewsHour segment is available.
April 8, 1997:
Two Senators report on the state of the food crisis in North Korea after returning from the region.
February 11, 1997:
The former U.S. ambassador to South Korea discusses the recent labor unrest there and the famine in North Korea.
December 31, 1996
Charles Krause leads a discussion with two experts on recent tensions between North and South Korea.
November 29, 1996
Rep. Bill Richardson (D-NM) brought home an American man who was being held in North Korea.
May 21, 1996
Facing the real possibility of famine, North Korea's government has allowed United Nations relief officials into what are normally closed borders.
April 15, 1996
President Clinton's spring Asia tour included a visit to South Korea.
December 29, 1995
High level Corruption arrests in South Korea's government.
MARGARET WARNER: North Korea used to be able to feed its 23 million people, but the country's collectivized and centrally planned agricultural economy suffered serious setbacks in the past decade: First, the end of subsidies from the former Soviet Union, then, more recently, two years of serious flooding. Now, international relief groups are warning that mass starvation may be imminent, despite the fact that the United Nations and some countries have donated 380,000 metric tons of rice and grain since 1995.
Here to give us a firsthand account of the situation there is a former U.S. relief official who has just returned from a five-day visit to North Korea. He's Andrew Natsios, now vice president of World Vision U.S., a private relief and development organization. Welcome, Mr. Natsios.
ANDREW NATSIOS, World Vision: Good evening.
MARGARET WARNER: How bad is the situation there?
ANDREW NATSIOS: Well, it's quite serious. This kind of famine in a totalitarian regime is not easy to see because the regime does not allow people to leave their villages. One of the last stages of any famine is mass population movements. And in North Korea you can't leave, so people are hungry in their own homes. Most of the pictures you see in television of the Ethiopian famine or Liberia or Angola are people on the move in the final stages of a famine when they're outside their own homes. When people are really hungry, they conserve energy by staying at home.
MARGARET WARNER: Well, give us a sense of where you went and how much freedom of movement you had. Did you have free access to wherever you wanted to go? How tightly were you controlled?
ANDREW NATSIOS: We were told where we would go. We asked to see certain kinds of institutions, children's institutions in particular, but everything was carefully planned, and we saw exactly what they wanted us to see. And so you have to look not just at what you see but what you don't see.
For example, we traveled for two hours north of Pyongyang, toward the Chinese border. I did not see one single vehicle on a four-lane highway for two hours. It--and the reason for that is there's no fuel left in the country. And there's no fuel to run industry, so industries all shut down. That has an effect on any economy. Secondly, outside of Pyongyang, outside of the capital, once you got past the suburbs, there are almost no animals. There were nine oxen I counted in two hours going through a rich agricultural area, and one pig. Now, I've been in famines all over the world, and you will see in the early stages of famine animals, and then people consume them to keep their families alive. And that's what appears to have happened.
The third thing we noticed is hundreds of people foraging for wild famine foods, leaves, grass, wild roots, tree bark. That is another sign of food stress and one of the stages of a famine. And we saw that very, very--everywhere--people were foraging in the forests and in the fields in non-cultivated areas for wild famine foods. The problem is those foods have no calories in them, so they don't keep you alive; they just repress the hunger you feel.
MARGARET WARNER: Make you feel full.
ANDREW NATSIOS: Exactly.
MARGARET WARNER: All right. Tell us what the people look like.
ANDREW NATSIOS: Well, we saw mostly children, and it is children under five in any famine who die first, and then the elderly and then pregnant women and nursing mothers, and then disabled people, and generally that order. We saw two orphanages and a kindergarten. The orphanages, 40 to 50 percent of the children were acutely malnourished; they had all of the physical evidence of that quash Nucor, which is a protein deficiency which can kill a child, and edema which is a swelling of the face when there is no muscle tissue and fat tissue left, just bone and skin, the body will fill up with water, basically, and the child is severely malnourished just does not appear that way unless you know what to look for, so we saw that and widespread in these orphanages that we saw, and excluding the one in Pyongyang, which is supposed to be the best orphanage in the country.
The other thing that we found very disturbing, and it's again an absence of something, on the streets of Huichon, a city two hours North of Pyongyang, close to the Chinese border--it's an industrial city of perhaps a quarter of a million people--we went to a hospital and saw malnourished children; we went to a kindergarten and saw malnourished children, but what we didn't see was something you see in every village, in every city in Asia, and that is elderly people.
Elderly people are revered in Asian culture, a very family centered culture. If you're not in a family, you don't exist sort of, but the elderly lead the families, and they're on the streets everywhere. There were almost no people over 60 anywhere in that city, and I found that to be very odd. And I asked about it, and the comment made to me by local officials and other people was that the elderly are keeping their grandchildren alive by not eating, and they're too weak to move around. Now, I wasn't sure that I was getting the real story, so I asked other NGO's who'd been to other areas of the country.
MARGARET WARNER: These are private relief organizations--
ANDREW NATSIOS: That's right.
MARGARET WARNER: That's non-governmental organizations.
ANDREW NATSIOS: Exactly. From the United States, from Europe, some of whom I had worked with in other areas of the world, U.N. officials and Red Cross officials, and they had the same story. Doctors would say the rising malnutrition rates--other than the children--are the elderly people, so we're losing a lot of elderly people. And if were just before the harvest, they could probably make it.
The problem is they've been suffering this way for three or four months. Many of them are debilitated. Some are dying, but the major crop doesn't come in until the end of September, the beginning of October, so we have four months, and the food pipeline, which is the food warehouses are nearly empty now according to the world food growers.
MARGARET WARNER: Explain now briefly, how are they getting the food they're getting? Is this all a government distribution?
ANDREW NATSIOS: That's right. That's the danger of the Marxist system, is everything's centralized into one system. We have food stamps. We have commercial sales. People grow food. Everything in North Korea, including the agricultural cooperatives, all that food goes into the public distribution system, and that's where you get your food from.
MARGARET WARNER: And that's where international aid goes too?
ANDREW NATSIOS: Exactly.
MARGARET WARNER: Now, is everyone sharing equally in this? There are reports that the military is still very well fed; that they have their own military warehouses of food.
ANDREW NATSIOS: Well, they have their own military warehouses, but there's been intelligence reports in Washington that have been published that say that the warehouses have been opened because the military, itself, is in trouble in terms of food aid. They have just enough to survive until the next harvest in October.
We do know that Pyongyang, the capital, is getting 450 grams of food a day, which is a minimum ration, but it will keep you alive. The rest of the country is getting 100 grams, which is way below what you need to survive. And the Northeast region, which we believe the greatest starvation is--I think people are dying in large numbers up there now, but no one is allowed up there, which is very troubling. They are getting no food distribution; from what we here, have gotten nothing this year at all.
MARGARET WARNER: And these--even those that are--I mean, give us a sense from the American diet, what is 100 grams?
ANDREW NATSIOS: Well, 100 grams would be a small cereal bowl, maybe two cups of tea worth of rice boiled in water, and then they put leaves and roots in it to sort of make it a little bit more interesting, but they'll have one of that a day.
MARGARET WARNER: One a day.
ANDREW NATSIOS: That's 100 grams.
MARGARET WARNER: All right. So what will it take, what would it take, do you think, to get over this hump till the end of September, this first--
ANDREW NATSIOS: Well, the World Food Program from the United Nations has just issued an agricultural assessment for the remaining four months of this agricultural year. And they estimate that they need an additional I think it's 1.2 or 1.3 million tons; another I think 200,000 tons is coming in from the U.S. Government, from South Korea, from China, from the European countries, but not enough, nowhere near enough.
MARGARET WARNER: And, briefly, on the donor side, what do you think is the chief political obstacle?
ANDREW NATSIOS: Well, we are taking sort of--
MARGARET WARNER: We, the United States?
ANDREW NATSIOS: Right. The United States Government is taking its lead from South Korea, its ally, which we certainly respect, but I think it's inappropriate in this case when people's lives are at risk. The South Korea government is very hostile because they're threatened by the North Korean military machine, which is huge, and the South Korea government is lobbying very hard not to spend--not to send too much food in. They want to spend a very modest amount, which is what's happened. And as a result of that, there's nowhere near enough food in, and they have virtual veto power, the South Korea government, over the Japanese and the United States and the Europeans.
MARGARET WARNER: Now the South Koreans point out, though, that North Korea still spends 1/4 of its Gross Domestic Product on the military. I mean, if they just spent a little less, they'd have plenty to buy food on the world market. Did you--
ANDREW NATSIOS: That's the problem; they wouldn't, because the exchange, the currency of North Korea is not exchangeable. No one would take North Korean currency and--in payment for anything. It's worth--
ANDREW NATSIOS: No, I don't think they will. The military is dominant in their government. What they have done is they've been trying to barter things. They have zinc ore. They have gold and some of their rivers, modest amounts of it, and they're bartering that. They've purchased about 330,000 tons of food commercially not with their currency; they have no foreign exchange left at all. There's no fuel left. The highways are empty.
MARGARET WARNER: All right.
ANDREW NATSIOS: And the factories have shut down so they're not producing anything manufactured, but basically, it's different wars. And they're selling lumber, which is very dangerous. They're denuding the countryside of trees.
MARGARET WARNER: Mr. Nat--
ANDREW NATSIOS: Which is going to increase the risk of more flooding in the future.
MARGARET WARNER: All right. Thank you so much for being with us. We have to leave it there.
ANDREW NATSIOS: Thank you.
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