Time has run out for the people of North Korea. The recent survey by the Korean American Sharing Movement (KASM), the most extensive report yet on the famine plaguing North Korea, indicates that many people have already died. Many more will die, unless there is substantial and immediate food assistance from Western countries.
The survey of more than 200 North Korean refugees from three Northeast provinces who now are living in China provided information on 1,009 family members. The refugees reported that nearly 250 family members, or 24 percent, had died over the past two years and that starvation was the cause of death in 63 percent of those deaths. Worse, starvation accounted for 90 percent of the deaths among children up to age nine. Moreover, almost 70 percent of the refugees reported losing one or more parents in the last two years.
There also are reports that the severe winter is taking its toll on the sick and young. Medicines are non-existent in many hospitals.
This famine, produced by failed economic policies and exacerbated by floods and drought, has forced the North Korean regime to ask for foreign assistance and invite aid workers into the country. One of World Vision’s staff members, who recently participated in a three-month food monitoring program, reported seeing people on the streets suffering from acute malnutrition, and people scavenging for food in fields already harvested. He told an AP reporter in Hong Kong that the country was in dire need of “just about everything.”
