North Korea, though moving out of its international isolation, faces renewed worries over long-time food security, according to a church-based observer with extensive experience in the communist country.

Due to a poor harvest in late 2000, North Korea was facing a 1.8 million ton food shortfall—its worst since 1997, said Erich Weingartner, former liaison officer of the United Nations World Food Program in Pyongyang, North Korea.

Weingartner said that while conditions might not yet be as grave as they were in the 1990s, when as many as a million people died, North Korea is now facing an aid crisis comparable to that in Bangladesh, where chronic food shortages were seen as an intractable problem.

"To the rest of the world, a humanitarian crisis like this does not seem to have a resolution," Weingartner said after a May 15 forum at New York's Interchurch Center.

On May 16, The Washington Post reported that North Koreans faced a "bleak spring" and were "once again eating leaves and roots to survive."

David Morton, the United Nations coordinator in Pyongyang, told the newspaper that authorities were urging citizens to begin producing "alternative foods" such as ground corn and cabbage stalks, roots, acorns, edible grasses and leaves.

"The food situation is still very critical," said Weingartner, a member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada and a former official of the World Council of Churches. More recently Weingartner has served as an intermediary between the Canadian and North Korean governments as they improve official relations.

Weingartner said the problem facing North Korea was not merely the food shortage, which worsened in the 1990s as a series of droughts and floods led to crop failures. The nation was also plagued by poor medical conditions and antiquated infrastructure.

"Dying from starvation is often indistinguishable from dying of disease," Weingartner said. Long-term aid would have to include a range of services, including medical assistance, fertilizers and technology to help improve the nation's water supply.

Weingartner lauded the widening of relations between North Korea and its Asian neighbors and others, especially in light of North Korea's increasing dependence on other countries for food. He praised churches from Canada, the United States and Europe for helping to "open doors" between North Korea and the outside world.

"Churches have been way ahead of others" on this issue, he said. "But we [in the churches] need to give the ball a bit more of a push."

International attention has focused on North Korea's steadily improving relations with the rest of the world, particularly with South Korea, its neighbor and adversary since the Korean War of the early 1950s. Attentions has also been directed at its shaky relations with the United States, which has condemned North Korea for—among other things—the manufacture and sale of missiles to Middle East countries.

The Bush administration, which has been reviewing its foreign policy towards North Korea, has indicated it will provide the nation with 100,000 ton of food at the request of the World Food Program.

Weingartner said there were some reformed-minded officials in North Korea, a nation of 22 million with a government often described as the last Stalinist regime on the planet.

"They know they need trade, investment and inputs, and that conditions won't change if things remain the same," he said. But, he added, there was still great reluctance to openly embrace assistance for fear that they may have to give up some control.

Re-focusing international attention on a long-standing emergency like North Korea's shortages was not easy, Weingartner said. One persistent difficulty was obtaining reliable numbers of those who had died from famine and related problems since the mid-1990s. The North Koreans put the figure at 250,000, while UN and relief organizations said the figure was between 500,000 and 1 million.

Weingartner predicted the numbers would rise again with Korea's latest food shortages. "We just don't know by how much," he said.

Related Elsewhere


The World Food Program, an aid organization of the United Nations, includes an overview of all the countries with WFP programs and an updated news section on its site.

The Washington Post May 16 article on the country's food crisis reported that International donors feed at least one-third of North Korea's 22 million people. Later that month, The Washington Post reported on the country's increasing persecution of Christians.

For more articles and resources, see Yahoo's full coverage area on the North Korea.

Previous Christianity Today articles on North Korea include:

South Koreans Help Neighbors (Aug. 9, 1999)

Famine Toll Exceeds 1 Million (Oct. 5, 1998)

Editorial: North Korea's Hidden Famine | The poor and the weak should not have to starve due to the policies of their government. (May 19, 1997)

Evangelicals Plead for Korean Aid (April 7, 1997)

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