North Korean Economy Watch

According to UPI:

U.S. relief efforts targeting North Korea jumped about 500 percent in 2011, trade export figures from the Commerce Department show.

The department said the United States shipped $9.4 million worth of goods to North Korea in 2011, up from about $1.9 million the previous year and $0.9 million in 2009. In 2008, the United States sent about $52.2 million in goods to the communist country.

South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency said Radio Free Asia reported 95 percent of the 2011 total was some form of aid for North Koreans, such food or basic household items, sent by private organizations.

Read the full story here:
U.S. shipments to N. Korea grew in 2011
UPI
2012-2-11

According to Yonhap:

The U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) said Tuesday it will help North Korea eradicate pests at forests near ancient tombs.

The Complex of Koguryo tombs, located in the North’s cities of Pyongyang and Nampo, has some 30 individual tombs from the late period of the Koguryo Kingdom, which controlled the northern half of the Korean Peninsula and northeastern China for more than 700 years until 668 A.D.

Read more about the UNESCO World Heritage sites in the DPRK here.

Read the full story here:
UNESCO to help N. Korea’s pest control efforts at ancient tombs
Yonhap
2012-1-24

Pictured above (Yonhap): Food aid to be delivered to the DPRK (2012-1-27)

According to Yonhap:

Representatives of a South Korean charity group plan to visit North Korea next week to deliver 180 tons of flour aid to North Korea to help ease its chronic food shortages, officials said Friday.

The planned shipment by the Seoul-based Korea Peace Foundation marks the first flour assistance to the communist country following the death last month of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il.

The UNDP also made public that it will place a priority on the DPRK this year:

Radio Free Asia says the United Nations Development Programme will place a priority on improving food security in North Korea by reducing crop losses after harvests.

The U.S. based broadcaster said the UNDP plans to save more crops and improve seed production by revamping North Korea’s crop storage facilities and farm equipment such as threshers and grinders.

Around 15 percent of crops harvested in Pyeongyang are said to be damaged every year, while only 13 percent of the 150-thousand tons of seed produced meet international standards.

Food security is achieved by securing a certain amount of food, taking into account potential population increases, natural disasters and war.

Additional Notes:
1. I believe the “Korea Peace Foundation” is also the “Korean Conference of Religion and Peace (KCRP)”

2. Read about South Korea’s aid to the DPRK in 2011 here.

3. CNN also covered the story about South Korean food aid.

Read the full Yonhap article here:
S. Korean group to send first flour aid to N. Korea after Kim’s death
Yonhap
2012-1-20

Lankov writes in the Korea Times:

This year, President Lee Myung-bak’s New Year address paid much attention to North Korea issues. The South Korean President warned the North against fresh provocations but the general tone of his speech was conciliatory.

Lee said that now is the time to put aside past problems and start to rebuild relations anew. Tellingly, he did not repeat that Seoul expects Pyongyang to apologize for the two military incidents of 2010 ― the sinking of the Cheonan and the shelling of Yeongpyeong Island.

Are there chances that Pyongyang will react to this charm offensive and rush to resume talks with Seoul? Don’t hold your breath ― such chances are very remote. Pyongyang decision makers understand perfectly well that an immediate detente is not in their long-term interests.

Pyongyang’s foreign policy goals are surprisingly easy to describe: They are regime security and obtaining unconditional aid (the former is an absolute priority with the latter a rather distant but still significant second). In other words, North Korea’s foreign policy makers want to squeeze as much aid as possible from the outside world but only so long as this aid comes without too many conditions which might have impact on regime security.

Since 2008, the North Korean state has found itself in a rather unpleasant situation: U.S. aid stopped almost completely while the amount coming from South Korea has dramatically decreased. In this new situation, North Korea has been left with just one aid provider ― that is, China. This is not a situation that Pyongyang’s elite is happy about.

Since the 1960s, North Korean diplomats have worked hard to ensure that their country would always have at last two overseas sponsors. It was preferable if the two sponsors had uneasy, if not hostile, relations, so that their rivalry could be used to ensure that only limited concessions would be given in exchange for aid.

For the early 1960s until the late 1980s, China and the Soviet Union were the sponsors. From the early 1990s, the Chinese continued and the Soviet Union was replaced by South Korea and the United States.

In order to decrease their dangerously high dependence on China, North Korean diplomats now want South Korea to resume large-scale aid ― in other words, to re-implement a version of the “Sunshine Policy,” the North Korean-directed policy of Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun when they were president in 1998-2007.

North Korean leaders are careful observers of the ever-changing South Korean political scene. They have to be, since milking the South has long since become their major source of revenue. They hope that the coming parliamentary and presidential elections will be won by the Korean nationalist left.

This is understandable, since left-leaning politicians in South Korea have always been more willing to provide the North with aid, without asking too many awkward questions. In recent years, it seems that the left has lost part of its earlier enthusiasm for such a policy, but one should still reasonably expect that a left-leaning (or as it would proudly style itself, “progressive”) administration will indeed be more receptive to Pyongyang’s demands.

So what should North Korea do to increase the chances of the South Korean left-leaning parties? Pretty much the only thing they can do is to “not” help the right, and this is exactly the reason why the recent conciliatory remarks by President Lee are likely to fall on deaf ears.

While the North Korea issue is marginal in South Korean politics, the left-leaning opposition can blame the Lee administration for its real (or alleged) mishandling of the North and the resulting instability on the Korean Peninsula (admittedly, this type of electoral rhetoric has a kernel of truth to it). Therefore, if the North agrees to play according to Lee’s rules, it will help the South Korean “conservatives” in presenting themselves as people who, at the end of the day, know how to maintain stability on the Korean Peninsula.

Of course North Korea would be rewarded if it were to talk right now. But from Pyongyang’s point of view it makes a great deal of sense to wait another year, in anticipation of the electoral success of the South Korean left. If the left is not successful in the end, then they can still easily make a deal with the next right-leaning administration. It is telling that in recent months the presidential contenders of the right have also indicated that they would be softer in their approach towards the North.

Therefore we should not expect a dramatic diplomatic breakthrough anytime soon. Fortunately though, we also do not have to be that afraid of fresh North Korean provocations. Consideration of South Korean electoral politics will probably mean that the North will try to avoid clashes with the South.

Read the full story here:
N. Korea’s political calculations
Korea Times
Andrei Lankov
2012-1-15

According to Yonhap:

South Korea has set aside more than 540 billion won (US$465 million) for humanitarian aid for North Korea this year, the Unification Ministry said Wednesday.

Most of the budget is earmarked for the South Korean government’s possible rice and fertilizer aid to its impoverished northern neighbor. It is also designed to provide aid to the North in case of natural disasters, according to the ministry, which handled inter-Korean affairs.

Read the full story here:
S. Korea sets aside more than 540 bln won for humanitarian aid for N. Korea
Yonhap
2012-1-11

Below are some excerpts from a recent blog post at Foreign Policy:

Despite the perception of North Korea as a country hermetically sealed to the outside — and despite the very real risks — dozens, if not hundreds, of Christian missionaries operate inside the country, sometimes living there for months at a stretch, in the capital, Pyongyang, or in the Rason region, near the country’s Chinese border. Some run factories, distributing bread and soy milk to the poor. Others work for NGOs or universities, like the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, North Korea’s first privately funded university (launched in 2010), which is bankrolled mostly by evangelical Christian movements. Its founder James Kim, who has spent prison time in North Korea for proselytizing, likes to say that he has “unlimited credit at the bank of heaven.”

Of the five NGOs that formed the consortium that the U.S. government worked with to deliver food aid to North Korea until 2009, four are evangelical Christian organizations. One of them, World Vision, only hires candidates who believe in Jesus. Heidi Linton runs Christian Friends of Korea, an organization that has sent more than $55 million dollars in food, supplies, and medical equipment throughout the country since 1995. Linton explains to North Korean patients and hospital staff that the donors give out of their love for God. “You don’t go into a lot of detail at that point, but we love because God first loved us,” says Linton. “No, we cannot give Bibles, we cannot give tracts, but we can live out for them what it means to be a Christian.” Asked how many people have been converted, she demurs: “We plant the seed and God brings in the harvest, in his time and in his way.”

So how do you bring the morals and values of Christianity to the world’s most closed country? With infinite patience. A missionary from the United States with almost 20 years of experience working with North Korea explains: “We’re not allowed to visibly pray. You can’t bow your head, and you can’t close your eyes. But when you’re praying you’re talking to God,” she says. “All the education we’re giving them is designed to make them think the truth — of all sorts.” Linton brought four ambulances into North Korea emblazoned with the Christian Friends of Korea logo, which includes a prominent cross. “They’ve told us multiple times that we need to change our name and our logo,” she says. “And we said, ‘No, that’s why we’re here.'” Proselytizing inside North Korea “has to be done almost exclusively in a one-on-one setting, where you talk to someone, typically someone you know very well, about faith,” says Todd Nettleton, director of media development at Voice of the Martyrs USA, who says that the organization and its partners dropped 1,467,600 Gospel fliers via balloons into North Korea in 2011.

“The picture we have of missionary work, where you go and try to talk to as many people as possible, or where you’re on a street corner handing out missionary tracts, is so far from [what is allowed in North Korea] it’s not even on the same planet. It’s painstaking, risky work.”

…

Little is known about Christianity in North Korea under Kim Il Sung, because so few North Koreans defected. When his son, Kim Jong Il, took power in 1994 and famine hit, hundreds of North Koreans fled to South Korea; thousands more began traveling back and forth across the Chinese border searching for food, acting as conduits of information between North Korea and the outside world. The famine and the death of Kim Il Sung also “coincided with the opening of North Korea to NGOs, hence the increased presence of missionaries” eager for a chance to preach the Gospel in the closed country, says Marie-Laure Verdier, a Ph.D. student at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London who is studying Christian organizations working in North Korea.

…

The threat of violence or imprisonment hasn’t stopped the evangelical movement; it has just made them more cautious. Chinese border cities like Yanji, the capital of China’s Korean autonomous region, and Dandong, through which most of the official trade between China and North Korea passes, act as bases for hundreds of American and South Korean evangelical Christians who help North Koreans get out of the country and who attempt to get themselves inside. One missionary living on the border spoke off the record because he didn’t want to upset the Chinese regional authorities, which he likened to “a sleeping dog.” Proselytizing is illegal in China, too, and the Chinese government, at least publicly, supports North Korea’s effort to forcibly repatriate defectors. In March 2011, I visited a Western cafe in Yanji where missionaries congregate and saw a woman wearing a sweatshirt from Wheaton College, the evangelical Protestant liberal arts university outside Chicago. I asked one of her tablemates whether that’s what had brought them to Yanji. “Food’s great here, isn’t it?” he replied.

* * *

Despite the danger missionaries face, it’s far more dangerous for North Koreans who come into contact with Christians or evangelical paraphernalia. Defectors have spoken about seeing friends and neighbors executed for the crime of simply owning a Bible. North Koreans themselves are often converted or co-opted to smuggle the Gospel into North Korea at great personal risk. On a 2011 visit to the border, I saw food packaged with a Christian symbol for delivery into North Korea. “People come across the border, we make them Christian, and then we send them back,” said the missionary associated with the food distribution. “We had a North Korean Christian several years ago who took five Bibles in with him, and he was beaten, literarily to death, when they found out that he had the Bibles on him,” says Nettleton.

But the majority of the missionaries involved with North Koreans work with them only when they’re safely outside the country. “For the ones who come out, Christianity can do a lot more for them because they need so much healing,” says a Christian activist in South Korea. Tim Peters runs Helping Hands Korea, an organization that helps North Korean women and children who have already crossed into China flee to other countries. He told a story of a man in North Korea who, in late December after the death of Kim Jong Il, became interested in Christianity. But after speaking about it in his community, he raised the suspicion of security forces. He and his family fled North Korea the next day, and Peters’s team near the Chinese border is now helping them. “Because they were discovered listening to Christian radio, if they were to be repatriated the punishment would be extraordinarily harsh,” says Peters. In a way, they’ve succeeded: More than half of the roughly 20,000 defectors in South Korea identify as Christians. “North Korean defectors associate Christianity with democracy,” says Verdier.

Rights groups estimate that of the 24 million North Koreans, there are only tens of thousands of Christians there today, though the exact number is unknowable. “My understanding is that the underground church is extremely underground,” says Peters. South Korean churches have amassed war chests of millions of dollars to bring Christianity to — and build thousands of churches for — their “brothers in the North” when the regime falls. Ben Torrey, raised in South Korea by missionary parents, runs the Fourth River movement, an organization that enhances preparedness among South Koreans and North Korean defectors, training them “as agents of reconciliation, healing, and problem solving” so that they can eventually enter North Korea and “rebuild the country on a foundation of biblical principles.”

Is the death of Kim Jong Il a propitious time, though, for missionaries and Christian organizations working inside North Korea? One spokesman at a Christian group that does extensive work in North Korea said hopefully, “We don’t have any contingency plans [for the regime falling], but the wheels could fly off the wagon and the structure could disintegrate. Who knows?” Many Christians who work with North Korea are worried that new leader Kim Jong Un, in a desire to reinforce his new mandate, will be even more hostile to them than his father. “We understand that [the North Korean underground church] is being even more cautious at present,” says Peters.

Read the full story here:
Preaching the Gospel in the Hermit Kingdom
Foreign Policy Blog
Isaac Stone Fish
2012-1-6

UPDATE (2011-12-13): According to Radio Free Asia (in Korean), the Chinese government has agree to provide the DPRK with new meteorological equipment.  According to the article:

중국 정부가 유엔 산하 기구를 통해 북한에 첨단 기상관측장비를 지원하기로 결정한 것으로 밝혀졌습니다.

정아름 기자가 보도합니다.

중국정부가 지난 12일 북한에 컴퓨터를 통해 기상관측 정보를 받아보는 자동기상 관측장비(Automatic Weather Systems) 4대를 지원 하겠다는 의사를 유엔 산하 세계기상기구에 전달했습니다.

세계기상기구는 13일 자유아시아방송(RFA)에 이번 지원의 정확한 시점과 지원대상지역은 정해지지 않은 상태이라고 전했습니다.

Here is the article translated by Google Translate.

Jospeh Bermudez recently wrote about the DPRK’s hydro meteorological service.

ORIGINAL POST: According to the Korea Times:

A meteorological expert called for international assistance for North Korea, saying it was lacking in up-to-date meteorological equipment.

The Radio Free Asia quoted Avinash Tyagi, director of the climate and water department of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), who visited North Korea in mid-March, as saying “equipment and computers used for weather forecasting were in urgent need of replacement.”

Tyagi’s visit with two other colleagues was the first by a WMO team in eight years.

They were supposed to visit the North last November in light of severe flooding last summer, but the trip was postponed.

The floods cost many lives and left many homeless in Sinuiju near the border with China, drawing immediate international humanitarian assistance, including from the South.

The expert said new equipment would help improve the food situation in the country and encouraged the international community to help. He added of the 186 observatories scattered through the country, only 27 were connected to the international meteorology network. Even the equipment there was outdated, made in the 1970 and 80s.

Food shortages are a chronic problem for North Korea, and this has got worse in recent years, which prompted the regime to run an unprecedented campaign to call for food aid from other countries.

More on the DPRK’s 2011 food situation here.

Read the full story here:
N. Korea in need of new meteorological equipment
Korea Times
4/1/2011

UPDATE 32 (2012-1-27): According to an article in the New York Times, inter-Korean trade and aid declined in 2011:

On Friday, the South’s Unification Ministry said that South Korean aid to the North fell to 19.6 billion won, or $17.5 million, last year [2011], down more than 51 percent from a year earlier [2010].

Inter-Korean trade fell by more than 10 percent [from 2010 to 2011] to about $1.5 million in 2011, the ministry said.

UPDATE 31 (2011-12-10): According to the Korea Times, the potential food aid is not being auctioned off.  It is being sent to South America. According to the article:

Seoul will send baby food originally offered as aid to North Korea to El Salvador following Pyongyang’s refusal to accept delivery, to help the South American country deal with damaging floods, officials said Friday.

The delivery consists of 190,000 packs of baby food that were part of a $4.4 million flood aid package to the North, which the Stalinist regime rejected two months ago amid high tension.

It was slated to depart from the port city of Busan via cargo ship for El Salvador, which has appealed for help to deal with floods that displaced tens of thousands earlier this year.

Seoul offered the aid, which also included biscuits and instant noodles, to help the North deal with torrential summer rains. But Pyongyang demanded cement and equipment instead and eventually shunned the offer altogether.

The rerouting of the items underscores lingering tension despite efforts to warm ties and eventually resume regional dialogue on dismantling the North’s nuclear program. Regional players want the situation on the peninsula to improve before the talks begin.

Pyongyang’s silence over the aid put a damper on the early signs of improvement. President Lee Myung-bak has been exercising a softer line since September, when he tapped close aide Yu Woo-ik as unification minister, including expanding humanitarian activities and cultural exchanges.

But the North, apparently seeking rice and other forms of massive aid, has recently slammed the flexible policy as political pandering to the South Korean public, which is gearing up for elections next year.

Such remarks come even as the unification ministry continues to approve northbound aid, including $5.65 million worth for infants, children and pregnant women through the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). Consultations are ongoing over how to provide more of the baby food. Seoul has also attempted to auction some of it off through a government website.

The North Korean regime is thought to be doing all it can to secure food and other handouts ahead of next April, when it will celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of its founder Kim Il-sung. Watchers say that the North is liable to alternate pressure and peace offensives to secure as much aid as it can through inter-Korean and multilateral channels.

UPDATE 30 (2011-12-6): According to the Korean Herald the first auction of potential food aid (See Update 27 below) did not go so well, so Seoul is trying again:

South Korea plans a second attempt to auction off baby food originally intended for North Korean children, officials said Tuesday.

The move comes after nobody bid for 540,000 packs of baby food on Onbid, an auction Web site run by the state-run Korea Asset Management Corp.

South Korea plans to issue a second public notice and adjust the prices, said an official handling the issue at the Unification Ministry. He did not elaborate on further details.

The baby food is part of 5 billion won ($4.4 million) worth of emergency relief aid South Korea had planned to ship to North Korean flood victims earlier this year.

South Korea dropped that plan in October after differences between the two Koreas on the items to be sent. South Korea had insisted it would deliver baby food, biscuits and instant noodles to the North, instead of the cement and equipment its communist neighbor had requested.

Separately, South Korea has been in talks with local private relief agencies over how to donate another 290,000 packs of baby food to other countries, according to another ministry official.

She declined to give further details, saying consultations are taking place.

UPDATE 29 (2011-12-5): The South Koreans will donate US$5.65 million to the DPRK via UNICEF.  Accoring to Yonhap:

South Korea said Monday it will donate US$5.65 million (about 6.5 billion won) for humanitarian projects in North Korea through the U.N. body responsible for the rights of children.

The donation to the United Nations Children’s Fund, or UNICEF, will benefit about 1.46 million infants, children and pregnant women in North Korea, according to the Unification Ministry, which is in charge of relations with the North.

Seoul’s contribution will be used to provide vaccines and other medical supplies as well as to treat malnourished children next year, said the ministry.

There have been concerns that a third of all North Korean children under five are chronically malnourished and that many more children are at risk of slipping into acute stages of malnutrition unless targeted assistance is sustained.

“The decision is in line with the government’s basic stance of maintaining its pure humanitarian aid projects for vulnerable people regardless of political situation,” Unification Ministry spokesman Choi Boh-seon told reporters.

South Korea has been seeking flexibility in its policies toward the North to try to improve their strained relations over the North’s two deadly attacks on the South last year.

…

South Korea donated $20 million for humanitarian projects in North Korea through the UNICEF between 1996 and 2009.

Last month, the South also resumed some $6.94 million worth of medical aid to the impoverished communist country through the World Health Organization.

..

Separately, South Korea also decided to give 2.7 billion won ($2.3 million) to a foundation to help build emergency medical facilities in an industrial complex in the North Korean border city of Kaesong.

More than 47,000 North Koreans work at about 120 South Korean firms operating in the industrial zone to produce clothes, utensils, watches and other goods. The project serves as a key legitimate cash cow for the impoverished communist country.

UPDATE 28 (2011-12-1): Distribution of private aid monitored in N.Korea. According to the Hankyoreh:

“North Koreans know that the wheat flour aid they received came from South Korea.”

These were the words of Cho Joong-hoon, director of the Unification Ministry’s humanitarian assistance division, during a meeting with reporters Wednesday at the Central Governmental Complex in Seoul upon his return from a recent visit to North Korea to monitor the distribution of aid.

“The name of the South Korean private aid group, the manufacturing company, the date, and the address were all printed on the packages of flour,” Cho said.

Arriving in North Korea on Sunday with Kim Min-ha, co-chairman of the private group Ambassadors for Peace, and three others, Cho visited three sites to observe the distribution of the 300 tons of flour provided in aid. The site were the Namchol Kindergarten, February 16 Refinery Kindergarten, and Tongmun Nursery in Chongju, North Pyongan.

It was the first visit to any part of North Korea besides Kaseong and Mt. Kumkang by a government official in the one year since the Yeonpyeong Island artillery attack on Nov. 23, 2010.

Cho said that the distribution, storage, preparation, and supply of the flour were monitored and that everything was confirmed to be proceeding as planned.

On the situation on the ground, Cho said, “Judging simply from the nursery and two kindergartens, the children’s nutritional condition does not appear to be good.” Cho noted that no heating was being supplied to the facilities despite the cold weather.

Cho said that while North Korean authorities did not official request food aid, a request was made under unofficial circumstances.

Cho also noted that construction efforts were under way on a highway connecting Pyongyang with Sinuiju.

“It is not very far from Pyongyang to Chongju, but I think the trip took about four hours because of the detour around the highway construction,” he said.

Analysts said this appears to be linked to hurried infrastructure building efforts, including highway servicing and construction, amid recent moves by North Korea to rebuild its economy through a stronger economic partnership with China.

UPDATE  27 (2011-11-29): Seoul auctions off “unwanted” DPRK food assistance. According ot the Korea Times:

South Korea has taken steps to auction off some baby food originally intended for North Korean children, an official said Tuesday.

The move comes nearly two months after South Korea dropped a plan to send 5 billion won ($4.3 million) worth of aid to North Korean flood victims, citing no response from the North as the reason for the change of plan.

South Korea had insisted it would deliver baby food, biscuits and instant noodles to the North instead of cement and equipment requested by the North.

South Korea’s Red Cross, which handles relief aid to the North, gave public notice of a bid for 540,000 packs of baby food on Onbid, an auction website run by the state-run Korea Asset Management Corp.

Separately, South Korea has been in talks with local private relief agencies over how to donate the other 290,000 packs of baby food to foreign countries.

Unification Minister Yu Woo-ik has ruled out rice aid to the communist country unless Pyongyang admits to last year’s deadly provocations.

South Korea suspended unconditional aid in 2008 and imposed sanctions on the North last year in retaliation for the sinking of a South Korean warship that was blamed on the North.

The North has denied involvement in the sinking that killed 46 sailors. It also shelled a South Korean border island in November 2010, killing four South Koreans.

Still, South Korea has selectively allowed religious and private aid groups to deliver humanitarian and medical assistance to North Korea.

Also on Tuesday, a Unification Ministry official and four civilians were to return home after a rare trip to the North aimed at ensuring that South Korea’s recent private aid had reached its intended beneficiaries.

UPDATE 26 (2011-11-25): According to Yonhap, ROK officials are traveling to the DPRK to monitor food aid:

A South Korean official and four civilians left for North Korea on Friday on a rare mission to ensure that recent aid from Seoul had reached its intended beneficiaries, an official said.

The trip comes a day after North Korea threatened to turn South Korea’s presidential office into “a sea of fire” in anger over Seoul’s massive military maneuvers near the tense sea border.

…

The Unification Ministry official and four civilians were to arrive in the North’s capital later Friday via Beijing, according to the Unification Ministry, which handles inter-Korean affairs.

It is first time that North Korea has allowed a South Korean official to travel to the isolated country to monitor aid since a conservative government took power in Seoul in 2008.

They are scheduled to visit a day care center and two other child care facilities in the northwestern city of Jongju to monitor how 300 tons of flour were distributed to children and other recipients, according to a civic group.

Ambassadors for Peace Association, a civic group that is partly funded by the Unification Group, donated the flour to Jongju, the birthplace of Unification Church founder Moon Sun-myung.

The civic group said the monitors also plan to discuss details on another 300 tons of flour aid before returning home Tuesday. Some members of the civic group are associated with the controversial Unification Church.

Read previous posts on the ROK’s aid to the DPRK in 2011 below:

(more…)

According to Yonhap:

Multidrug-resistant tuberculosis has emerged as a major public health problem for North Korea, a private foundation said Thursday, calling for public donation to help combat the highly contagious disease.

Stephen W. Linton, chairman of the Eugene Bell Foundation, said his foundation currently treats some 600 multidrug-resistant patients in six medical centers in the North, but hundreds of people are still on the waiting list.

You can read more about the Eugene Bell Foundation’s work in the DPRK here.

Previous posts on the Eugene Bell Foundation here. Their web page is here.

Read the Yonhap story here:
Multidrug-resistant tuberculosis poses public health risk in N. Korea
Yonhap
2011/10/27

1. “Relying on One’s Strength: The Growth of the Private Agriculture in Borderland Areas of North Korea”
Andrei Lankov，Seok Hyang Kim ，Inok Kwa
PDF of the article here 

The two decades which followed the collapse of the communist bloc were a period of dramatic social and economic transformation in North Korea. The 1990-2010 period was a time when market economy re-emerged in North Korea where once could be seen as the most perfect example of the Stalinist economic model. The present article deals with one of the major areas of socioeconomic change which, so far, has not been the focus of previous studies. The topic is about the growth of private agricultural activities in North Korea after 1990. This growth constitutes a significant phenomenon which has important social consequences and also is important from a purely economic point of view: it seems that the spontaneous growth of private plots played a major role in the recent improvement of the food situation inside North Korea.

______________________

3. Korea Sharing Movement anti-malarial program (Via Cancor)
Read a PDF of on the project here

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4. What is it like to teach at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST)?
Find out from one instructor here. More on PUST here.