The terrible price of Pyongyang's nuclear hunger

The fields of North Hwanghae province in southwestern North Korea looked lush and green when I was there in July. One of the North Korean minders helpfully explained why the farmers there had it pretty good. They divided their crops between the state and themselves. The more they grew, the more they got to eat. 

And you couldn’t miss the corn growing around the houses, right up to the walls and windows. Those were “private plots” – evidence that North Korea wasn’t so rigidly communist after all.

Of course, nobody in his or her right mind would go away thinking North Korea was doing all that well. Still, a glance from the tour bus did seem persuasive. Some people believed North Korea might really be doing OK. 

One could say we were shown the breadbasket of North Korea.  The country, after all, is not a desert. They’ve got to grow rice somewhere – though not nearly enough to feed everybody.

Sceptical though I try to be when presented with pretty visions of North Korea, I must say I was surprised to read recently that North Hwanghae and neighbouring South Hwanghae province were suffering from famine.

Who would have believed we were in the midst of scenes of starvation? How were we to guess while visiting a folklore museum and then a building where they showed the horrors of US forces as they invaded the North following the marine landing at Incheon in September 1950?