The famine bailout season in North Korea

Washington Post:

A grim rite of spring in Northeast Asia is the calculation of how many North Koreans could starve before the fall harvest -- and what the neighbors are willing to do about it.

This year, though, the famine bailout season is more urgent, more complicated and more politically explosive than at any time since the mid-1990s, when millions starved behind North Korea's closed borders.

Severe crop failure in the North, surging global prices for food and tougher behavior by donors, particularly South Korea and China, are putting unaccustomed pressure on Kim Jong Il's dysfunctional communist state.

"For Kim Jong Il, this will be his most difficult year," predicts Park Syung-je, a scholar at the Asia Strategy Institute in Seoul, referring to the North's dictator. "North Korea does not have much choice for food."

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Roughly a third of children and mothers are malnourished, according to a recent U.N. study. The average 8-year-old in the North is seven inches shorter and 20 pounds lighter than a South Korean child of the same age.

This year is anything but good. Floods last August ruined part of the main yearly harvest, creating a 25 percent shortfall in the food supply and putting 6 million people in need, according to the U.N. World Food Program.

Over the winter, drought damaged the wheat and barley crop, according to a recent report in the official North Korean media. That crop normally tides people over during the summer "lean season" until the fall harvest.

North Korea's ability to buy food, meanwhile, has plunged, as the cost of rice and wheat on the global market has jumped to record highs, up 50 percent in the past six months.

Equally important for North Korea, its reliably generous neighbors seem to be operating under new, less tolerant rules for charity.

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For those who say a pure form of communism has never been tried, consider North Korea. It is a demonstration state for communism. What it demonstrates is how incompetent a state can be when it is in charge of everything. It is the ultimate control freak state and like other communist states it has been a disaster for the people who are supposed to benefit from communism.

Hugo Chavez should be taking notes so he will know where he is headed.