Hidden aid packages belie Kim’s vow to feed his ‘little kings’
The secretive state finds it hard to admit its children are suffering malnutrition on a scale not seen for years
The Children’s Foodstuffs factory in North Korea’s capital city has a proud tradition of nourishing generations of the country’s young with its fresh and powdered milk and delicious soybean yogurt drinks.
Every day at 7am dozens of vans set out on their delivery runs from the regional branches to thousands of kindergartens. Such is the importance of their mission that the vans are given the same status as ambulances on North Korea’s roads.
“Cars need to give way to the soy milk delivery vans. They are called king’s cars because our Great Leader said that the children of our country are king,” said Cha Song-chol, the chief of technology, referring to Kim Jong-un, who visited the site in 2014.
Equipped with state-of-the-art machinery, the main Pyongyang factory houses a large study area where rows of bright researchers pour through government-vetted scientific journals downloaded onto the hermit kingdom’s heavily controlled intranet.
The facility overseen by Cha, its supervisor, is impressive, but the glorification of Kim’s personal instructions to make it a world-class milk provider for the nation’s youth, masks an uncomfortable truth.
During a visit last week, a World Food Programme logo spotted on the crates hidden underneath layers of white sacks told a darker story of devastating long-term food shortages that this year left one in five children born in the repressive regime stunted because of chronic malnutrition.
While natural disasters like floods and droughts bear some blame, so too do the policies of Kim and his forebears who for decades isolated their country and crippled its economic growth by pursuing nuclear weapons, invoking international sanctions.
But as Kim pursues his diplomatic détente with the United States and South Korea, the sight of hungry children is not in keeping with the image he wishes to portray as an emerging international statesman.
Although reluctant to admit it, the Foodstuffs factory plays a vital role in alleviating child malnutrition, which though still dire, has seen at least seen some improvement this year.
Besides making its own products, it is also one of 11 local facilities co-opted by the WFP to help make fortified foods for the most vulnerable infants.
Every month the UN aid agency assists 650,000 North Korean women and children, but a total of 10 million people – about 40 per cent of the population – remains undernourished and require humanitarian assistance.
Despite the desperate need, the WFP said it was unable to hit its funding target for North Korea this year and appealed for urgent help.
“We must not wait for diplomatic progress to alleviate the suffering… funds are urgently needed now,” said Herve Verhoosel, a WFP spokesman.
Nearly £6 million was needed over the next five months to avoid cuts to the food assistance programme. The shortfall this year meant that 190,000 children had lost nutritional support.
North Korea has had a tough time – economic mismanagement, the withdrawal of Soviet support and a series of natural disasters led to a catastrophic famine in the Nineties. Between 240,000 and 3.5 million people died of starvation and disease.
The so-called Arduous March of 1994-98 left not only a physical mark on the nation’s health but an enduring mental impact on the 30-somethings and above of today, who remember people eating tree bark and grass. It also fed into a national psyche that
‘It is our goal to fully solve the food security problem by 2020, which is the final year of our five-year national development plan’
promotes selfsufficiency and resilience. Harvests are a source of gratitude and city office workers are expected to give one or two weeks a year to help farmers in the field.
With the exception of some aid workers, foreigners are not permitted to travel freely through the provinces facing malnutrition, like Ryanggang, which borders China in the north.
But even in Pyongyang, the population appears shorter and thinner than in South Korea’s capital, Seoul, just 120 miles away, even if they are fitter through cycling as they cannot acquire cars.
North Korea publicly acknowledges the country’s nutrition problems to an extent.
“It is our goal to fully solve the food security problem by 2020, which is the final year of our five-year national development plan,” said Professor Ri Gi Song, an economist at the Pyongyang Institute of Social Sciences.
In May, David Beasley, WFP’S executive director, spoke of a sense of optimism among the citizens about their country’s recent turn toward international diplomacy with South Korea and the US. His team had stressed the need to provide access, data and transparency, and the North Koreans “gave us all indications that they plan to work with us”, Mr Beasley told the New York Times.
But that optimism has waned as talks between Pyongyang and Washington faltered over the slow progress of the nuclear disarmament process and America’s reluctance to lift sanctions. Humanitarian aid, which had already suffered under sanctions on farming and medical equipment, took another hit this summer when the Trump administration stopped US aid workers going there. Other US citizens had been forbidden since September 2017 but the new curb is being viewed as a political pressure tactic.
“It’s because of the lack of progress on the North Korean side,” said Kee Park, an American neurosurgeon who had planned to go there to help.
Blocking medical experts risks a child becoming paralysed, he said. In Pyongyang’s smartest hospitals the top facilities frequently presented to foreign visitors give a contrary picture of the true state of the nation’s health; while criticising sanctions they boast of their great strides in medical care.
“If they target medical facilities then from a humanitarian point of view there is something seriously wrong with the decision-makers’ policy,” said Kim Un-ae, an official at the Ryugyong Ophthalmic hospital in the capital, a deluxe institution oddly devoid of the normal bustle of a downtown hospital.
Mun Chang-un, a guide at the Pyongyang maternity hospital, was more bullish, first claiming that the country’s birth rate was flourishing – it’s not – and making the staggering claim that “50-60 babies” were born here daily. Doctors were “unavailable” to verify the facts, he said.
When asked how the hospital had acquired its technology despite the sanctions he perked up further. “Where there’s a will there’s a way,” he quipped.
‘If they target medical facilities then there is something seriously wrong with the decision makers’