Starving North Koreans eating grass

Starving North Koreans are foraging for wild grasses to augment scant spring food supplies, a World Food Programme official said today.

Gerald Bourke, a spokesman for the UN agency in Beijing, said there was insufficient food coming in for WFP to feed hungry North Koreans.

But he said the situation was a bit less dire than in February, when cereals were cut off from all but 85,000 of the four million women, children and elderly people who are the WFP’s “core beneficiaries”.

“It’s the middle of what we call the lean season between harvests,” Bourke said.

He described a period when domestic stockpiles are running low, and the winter thaw has made wild mountain grasses available as a “coping mechanism” for hungry families in the nation’s southern regions.

“There’s relatively little food going in – insufficient food,” Bourke said. “We’ve got a couple shipments coming within the next week or so. We’re still not able to feed all the people on our books, and it’s looking particularly grim for the second half of the year.”

North Korea’s isolated, Stalinist regime has relied on foreign aid to feed its people since revealing in the mid-1990s that its state-run farming industry had collapsed following decades of mismanagement and the loss of Soviet subsidies.

The country’s government has few allies and is in the midst of a dispute with the United States over its nuclear programme, which Washington demands be dismantled.