Posted on 05/28/2012 11:44:04 AM PDT by Pinkbell
NAMPHO, North Korea — North Korea is reporting a serious drought that could worsen already critical food shortages, but help is unlikely to come from the United States and South Korea following Pyongyang's widely criticized rocket launch.
North Korea has had little rain since April 27, with the country's western coastal areas particularly hard hit, according to a government weather agency in Pyongyang. The dry spell threatened to damage crops, officials said, as the country enters a critical planting season and as food supplies from the last harvest dwindle.
In at least one area of South Phyongan Province where journalists from The Associated Press were allowed to visit, the sun-baked fields appeared parched and cracked, and farmers complained of extreme drought conditions. Deeply tanned men, and women in sun bonnets, worked over cabbages and corn seedlings. Farmers cupped individual seedlings as they poured water from blue buckets onto the parched red soil.
"I've been working at the farm for more than 30 years, but I have never experienced this kind of severe drought," An Song Min, a farmer at the Tokhae Cooperative Farm in the Nampho area, told the AP.
It was not clear whether the conditions around Nampho were representative of a wider region. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization said it had not yet visited the affected regions to confirm the extent and severity of the reported drought.
North Korea has suffered chronic food shortages for the past two decades because of economic and agricultural mismanagement as well as natural disasters. A famine in the 1990s killed an estimated hundreds of thousands of people.
The country's past appeals for food aid have been met with some skepticism, however, amid concerns that aid would be diverted to the military and Pyongyang elite without reaching the hungry.
(Excerpt) Read more at seattletimes.nwsource.com ...
whoever decided to turn that into a song is an idiot. I couldn’t watch it because of that idiot singing.
bookmark
You are a sick puppy. Go find yourself some professional help.
When the starving start banging on your door, and you have nothing to give, and they think you are lying, we'll see where your compassion is. Its coming.
I think what you just stated is understandable, in light of the fact that you a.) still have family in Korea and b.) the poster in question ‘MrPiper’ appears to have comprehension issues, but my view is that from a purely humanitarian standpoint, the video I posted the URL to in my #11 speaks for itself. A horrific tragedy is taking place in North Korea and the appeasement of that regime has to end, I am not advocating sending more aid to the Kim regime which will do nothing but keep their military and their elites well fed, the only thing that Kim Jong Un and those backing him are going to understand is the use of force.
, north side only, the south is worth saving. Folks north Of the DMZ are walking dead.
the good thing about NK is it is a poster child for the communist and I love to hold it up to gun banners.
look at all the good American men in WWII who gave their all for what? The Obama world?
What do you think should be done to NK if not nuke? You think more strongly worded Obama letters will help?
If the two koreas were united, I think in about 15 years they would become a bigger economy than the UK or France. The rank would probably end up something like: USA, china, japan, brazil, germany, korea.
It needs to happen.
Who/says it needs to? It won’t because north Korea’s nuts and hardcore communist.
so was east germany...look at them now.
China want a them separate, there is no leverage to change this and we do not have Reagan bankrupting the evil soviet empire to tear the wall down. Further the level of control over average citizens in nk is much greater than east Germany, which was occupied by Soviets and had friendly puppet governments installed. To equate the two is utterly ridiculous.
What are you smokin? A country divided in half with commies on one side and capitalist democracy on the other...You say its not similar to germany? Whatever.
I did not say they didn’t have some similarities.
I am saying what you did, in equating the two, just because they have some similarities, that because unification worked for Germany it will for Korea too, is ridiculous - because there are also a lot of differences to their particular situation that weren’t issues for Germany.
Please refrain from replying to me.
Is this one of those magic droughts that only affect communist countries? Must be. I’m sure the hunger has nothing to do with the system itself.
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