Posted on 06/02/2005 6:49:44 AM PDT by prairiebreeze
ROME -- North Korea is sending millions of people from its cities to work on farms each weekend -- another indication that the risk of famine is particularly high this year, a U.N. official said yesterday.
The U.N. World Food Program (WFP) is the only aid organization that has a presence outside the North Korean capital,.
"It's not a new phenomenon, but it certainly caught our folks' attention in terms of the size and the scale," she said. "I suppose also we're so worried about the situation, it's one more sign that things aren't going well."
The isolated North has depended on outside support to feed its 24 million people since the 1990s. An estimated 1 million North Koreans starved to death after the Stalinist regime's state farm system collapsed after decades of mismanagement and the loss of subsidies from Moscow.
In Beijing on Tuesday, world aid agencies called for food assistance to North Korea to be stepped up despite a stalemate in talks to end its nuclear program, saying the communist regime still faces tremendous shortages affecting millions of people.
The WFP recently launched a new appeal for food donations, saying the supplies that let it feed 6.5 million North Koreans were dwindling and forcing it to cut off aid to children and the elderly. That followed a WFP request to governments for 500,000 tons of food for North Korea this year.
Of the $202 million that the agency appealed for this year, it has received about $72 million -- and practically all of it has been consumed, Miss Webb said.
"Unless something happens very soon, by the end of August, the only people we'll be feeding are 12,000 children in hospitals," she said.
(Excerpt) Read more at insider.washingtontimes.com ...
Wow. Sounds like Uncle Joe is back.
Agrarian Reform, otherwise known as "Communism", has killed six times more people than the Doomsday Flu of 1918. Nothing has killed more people in all of human history.
Doesn't stop people trying it though. It's a memetic disease and some people have no immunity.
pong
Not too much sympathy for these morons. Gotta get a nuke and have a gargantuan army but can't feed it own people.
Misplaced priorities.
Until they take matters into their own hands the hell with them. Let them eat dirt.
Sounds more like a DU/RAT utopian dream.
The Communists in Cambodia used this method of exterminating vast numbers of city dwellers as well. It's very effective. It would work equally well in the USA, since most people have no concept of how to grow their own food.
Pretty harsh there. Since I doubt the average NK citizen has weapons, how would you suggest they take matters into their own hands against a well armed, well trained military?
It's interesting about sending them out on weekends. Like the weeds don't grow, and the crops don't need watered or picked Monday through Friday.
Yep.
What are they growing, poppies for opium?
Kind of reminds you of the Cambodian killing fields doesn't it?
They check out but they don't check back in..?
Somewhere, Pol Pot is smiling.
"Since I doubt the average NK citizen has weapons, how would you suggest they take matters into their own hands against a well armed, well trained military?"
That well armed, well trained military are citizens too. If they can stand by and watch as their fellow countrymen die of starvation without rebelling against their oppressors then they are not human. I can't get too upset when a subhuman culture destroys its self.
Communism is a disease. Often it's fatal for those infected, but the one thing we do know, is that it can not be cured by appeasement. That only prolongs and spreads the illness.
No argument from me about the malignancy of communism. I just wonder how realistic it is to expect sufficient numbers of citizens to band together and overthrow an entrenched regime.
Infiltration at top levels with an ensuing coup would be more likely to effect change. But just as unlikely I'm afraid.
I've often been tempted to do this with Ivy League faculty and residents of the Upper West Side.
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