North Korea: 8.7 million people face starvation
With no machines and all the livestock eaten, quiet lingers in rural areas of nation where 8.7 million face hunger 
By MARK MacKINNON, HYANGSAN, NORTH KOREA In a country where citizens are subjected to ceaseless propaganda telling them that they live in a socialist paradise, it’s the silence that tells the other side of the story. You can stand in the middle of some Pyongyang streets, even at rush hour, and hear only the occasional sound of an automobile engine because private cars are so rare. The quiet lingers, too, in the so-called industrial towns, their skylines dominated by smokestacks that never seem to be in use. The silence is the sound of an economy in collapse, and nowhere is it more noticeable than in the countryside beyond the showcase capital city. Here, farmers tend their crops with hoes, shovels and their bare hands while the occasional piece of rusting farm equipment – rendered useless by a fuel shortage – sits idle amid the vast fields of rice and corn. Despite having more arable land per capita than the United Kingdom or Belgium, North Korea is chronically, desperately short of food, and spiralling downward into its worst crisis in a decade. The United Nations says some 8.7 million North Koreans – more than one third of the population of 23 million – are in need of food aid, marking the country’s worst food crisis since a famine in the late 1990s that by some estimates claimed the lives of three million people. Almost three-quarters of North Korean households have reduced their food intake, and malnutrition among children under the age of 5 has risen dramatically, a result of diarrhea caused by eating food scrounged from the wild. … “There are no farm animals, virtually no machinery. They’re not practising anything like crop rotation,” said Paul French, author of North Korea: The Paranoid Peninsula. “You know there’s a problem when people have eaten all the livestock.” …
