The World Food Program has drawn a devastating portrait of widespread hunger in North Korea. Millions of people survive by eating grasses, corn stalks or whatever else they can forage, the U.N. agency reported Tuesday. Most of North Korea's 23 million people rely on food rations from the nation's communist government. But now, they can expect little food until the first of summer's vegetable and potato crops are harvested in June, said David Morton, the WFP representative in North Korea's capital, Pyongyang.
Most people try to survive by whatever coping mechanisms they have.
North Korea's public food stocks have been used up, the agency said. The gap between harvests has become an annual occurrence in North Korea's four years of slow-motion famine. Floods, drought and other natural disasters ruined North Korea's collective agriculture already crippled by mismanagement and the loss of crucial Soviet bloc trading partners. Without food and imported fuel, North Korea's centrally planned economy has largely broken down. Morton said the worst food shortages were believed to be occurring in the cold, land-scarce, heavily urbanized northeast.