From the Korea Times:
A head doctor of Hyundai Asan Hospital in the Kumgang tourist area, which was set up to deal with emergency cases among South Korean tourists, told Unification Minister Lee Jong-seok that North Korean soldiers sometimes sneak into the hospital.
Their commander has apparently ordered them to stay away from the South Korean tourist districts, but still the ordinary soldiers come to get better medical treatment, he said.
From the Korea Herald:
The South Korean Ministry of Science and Technology yesterday announced this year’s cooperative science and technology projects between South and North Korea.
The ministry selected 15 projects, including new and ongoing ones. They are regarded as having future viability and continuity, the ministry said.
These projects will be supported for the next three years at least, while being evaluated on a regular basis, the ministry said.
For the South-North cooperative science projects, the ministry has invested a total of 4.8 billion won from 1999 to 2005. The ministry has allocated 650 million won for this year.
The 15 projects include the Korea Transport Institute’s peninsula-wide traffic specifications; Korea Center for Disease Control & Prevention’s study on malaria in North Korea; the Korea Research Institute of Chemical Technologies’ study on chemical products as basic necessities; Pohang University of Science and Technology’s training program for computing specialists; Inha University’s initiative to develop North Korea’s wind power resources; Korea Institute of Machinery and Materials’ research on North Korea-originated magnesite; Korea Research Institute of Bioscience and Biotechnology’s development of cold-resistant sweet potatoes to alleviate North Korea’s food shortage.
Also, there are Andong University’s South-North comparative study on fossils in the paleozoic era; Korea Institute of Geoscience and Mineral Resources’ peninsula-wide geological map; Science & Technology Policy Institute’s analysis on North Korea’s science and technology policy; Seoul National University’s parasite control technology; and Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information’s project for North Korean infrastructure building.
The project selection utilized the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information’s analysis tool for documents and patents, the ministry added.
Dubbed “KITAS,” the tool has helped the ministry analyze North Korea’s 22 different kinds of academic documents, which amounted to 38,000 volumes.
The ministry then selected promising areas of cooperation, which include biotechnology, machine manufacture, and non-metal mineral exploitation.
With its food crisis, North Korea has a particular interest in biotechnology, such as plant breeding and rabbit cloning, the ministry said.
“I think biotechnology cooperation between the two Koreas will be very promising,” said Yoon Dae-sang at the ministry’s science-technology cooperation division.
Korea Times
Kim Rahn
4/19/2006
North Korea has about 763,000 disabled people, 3.41 percent of its total population, according a report.
The World Association of Milal, a South Korean missionary organization, released the report Wednesday which it obtained from a North Korean organization, the only group in the North supporting the disabled.
The report said there were 763,237 disabled people in the North as of 1999. Among them, 296,518 people, or 38.8 percent, were physically disabled, while 168,141, or 22 percent, had hearing troubles, 165,088 or 21 percent had eyesight impairment, and 37,780 were mentally handicapped.
By sex, the male disabled accounted for 57 percent, 435,045 people.
The report said Pyoksong county in South Hwanghae Province had the highest ratio of residents with disabilities, with 5.1 percent. The region was followed by Tongchon of Kangwon Province with 3.9 percent and Pyongwon in South Pyongan Province, with 3.8 percent.
In Pyongyang, where North Korea claims not a single disabled person lives, 1.75 percent of the city’s population were disabled. Urban areas had more handicapped people than rural areas, with 64 percent of the total.
More than 30 percent of the total disabled were in asylums, 23.8 percent were laborers, 9.4 percent were intellectuals, 7.8 percent were farmers, and 1.9 percent were students.
About 40 percent developed the disabilities from diseases, while 15.6 percent were congenital, and 19 percent from accidents.
In South Korea, about 1.7 million people are registered as disabled, more than twice that of North Korea.
In the South, the ratio of the physically disabled is about 41 percent of total handicapped people, higher than that of the North. The ratio of those with hearing problems and eyesight trouble in the South is lower than the North, with 10.3 percent and 12.5 percent, respectively.
From the Times of London:
3/9/2006
Michael Sheridan
ALL baby triplets in North Korea are being removed from their parents and placed in bleak state orphanages where they are fed by foreign aid.
The policy has prompted concern among diplomats and aid officials, who have witnessed sets of babies kept in special “triplet rooms” in orphanages across the country.
“There is no doubt that the policy is compulsory and universal,” said a seasoned diplomatic visitor to North Korea who has seen the rooms. He said he had not noticed family members visiting the children in his many calls at the orphanages. Conditions when foreigners are allowed to enter appear to be spartan but clean, according to several witnesses.
Food supplies to orphanages are a priority for both the United Nations relief agencies and the North Korean authorities. Local officials have assured inquirers that the babies are being given privileges to relieve their parents of the anxiety of feeding three mouths while the impoverished Stalinist nation endures an eighth year of food shortages.
But diplomatic experts who understand the Korean language and culture cast doubt on the official explanation.
They believe the true reason is linked to some of the most bizarre aspects of Kim Jong-il’s dictatorship. The number three is auspicious in Korean mysticism and triplets are revered for exceptional good fortune. Some believe they may be destined for power and great achievements, which would account for the regime’s desire to keep them under observation.
Diplomats and international aid officials also doubt that poverty is the explanation, because not even triplets born to high-ranking party members are exempt. “It may be officially atheistic and Stalinist but essentially North Korea operates a state religion infused with superstition, astrology and a personality cult which glorifies Kim as a unique individual,” said the veteran diplomat. “You don’t take any chances with rivals in that system.”
Power conferred by blood descent is also important in Korea’s Confucian tradition. The North Korean capital, Pyongyang, was rebuilt by its communist rulers along principles of Chinese geomancy, with “power lines” linking the purported birthplace of the previous dictator, Kim Il-sung, with the purported tomb of Tangun, founder of the Korean race. As heir to the world’s only communist dynasty, the younger Kim exploits every such tradition to exalt himself, while keeping a careful watch on his clan network of intermarried army and party men.
Children of the elite are usually taken from their parents by the age of two and placed in party-controlled schools to break family bonds and to consecrate their devotion to Kim. Foreign observers believe the triplets are kept together and transferred to these schools when old enough.
The segregation of triplets has provoked debate among UN aid agencies and non-governmental organisations delivering help to North Korea.
Although there appear to be no reasons to fear for the physical safety of the triplets, regular visitors to North Korean orphanages report desperate scenes of isolation and sadness.
On a recent visit a member of a foreign delegation entered a room to see infants placed several to a cot, all rocking backwards and forwards.
“Our people were stunned into silence,” the delegate said. A paediatrician outside North Korea who assessed evidence collected on the visit diagnosed severe emotional trauma.
Witnesses said they had noticed better nursing attention and care for triplets in the special rooms. “But none of those infants knows what affection is,” said one visitor. “Our staff try to cuddle them for a few minutes but then, of course, we have to leave.”
Up to 300 sets of triplets a year are believed to be born in North Korea. In an official statement to the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva, North Korea said: “Triplets are supplied by the state free of charge with clothing, bedding, a one-year supply of dairy products and a pre-school subsidy, and special medical workers take charge of such mothers and children and care for their health.”
The UN’s World Food Programme has reported a sharp improvement in children’s health in North Korea thanks to foreign aid. Since 1998 cases of acute malnutrition in children under seven have fallen from 16% to 9%, and the number of underweight children has decreased from 61% to 21%.
As tension mounts between North Korea and the United States over Pyongyang’s nuclear programme, however, aid officials fear that any military clash could put at risk their ability to feed the children.
There is little doubt of the regime’s cold-hearted approach to paediatrics. In 1998, Médecins sans Frontières pulled out of North Korea, alleging that aid agencies were denied access to so-called 9-27 camps in which sick and disabled children had been dumped under a decree issued by Kim to “normalise” the country.
UN agencies are still arguing for access to closed districts in the northeast of the country, where prison camps and military facilities are located.
Los Angeles times
Josh Meyer and Barbara Demick
12/12/2005
Pyongyang is accused of being behind a growing effort to print and move rafts of U.S. $100 bills.
The counterfeiting operation began a quarter of a century ago, he recalled, at a government mint built into a mountain in the North Korean capital.
Using equipment from Japan, paper from Hong Kong and ink from France, a team of experts was ordered to make fake U.S. $100 bills, said a former North Korean chemist who said his job was to draw the design.
“The main motive was to make money, but the secondary motive was inspired by anti- Americanism,” said the chemist, now 56 and living in South Korea.
Before long, sheets with 30 bills each were rolling off the printing presses. By 1989, millions of dollars’ worth of high-quality fakes were showing up around the world. U.S. investigators dubbed them “supernotes” because they were virtually indistinguishable from American currency. The flow of forged bills has continued ever since, U.S. officials say, despite a redesign intended to make the cash harder to replicate.
For 15 years, U.S. officials suspected that the North Korean leadership was behind the counterfeiting, but they revealed almost nothing about their investigations into the bogus bills or their efforts to stop them. Now, however, federal authorities are pursuing at least four criminal cases and one civil enforcement action involving supernotes.
U.S. authorities have unsealed hundreds of pages of documents in support of the cases in recent months, including an indictment that directly accuses North Korea of making the counterfeit bills, the first time the U.S. has made such an allegation in a criminal case.
The documents paint a portrait of an extensive criminal network involving North Korean diplomats and officials, Chinese gangsters and other organized crime syndicates, prominent Asian banks, Irish guerrillas and an alleged ex-KGB agent.
The criminal cases and U.S. Treasury enforcement action are part of a concerted campaign to deprive North Korea of as much as $500 million a year from counterfeiting currency and other criminal activities, senior U.S. law enforcement and intelligence officials say.
The officials say criminal syndicates in South America, Eastern Europe and elsewhere have also churned out large sums of fake U.S. cash. But North Korea’s is the only government believed to do so, despite international pressure and laws that characterize such activity as an economic casus belli, or act of war, they say.
“It is simply unacceptable for a member of the international community to engage in this type of irresponsible conduct as a matter of state policy, and [North Korea] needs to cease its criminal financial activities,” Daniel Glaser, deputy assistant Treasury secretary for terrorist financing and financial crimes, said in an interview. “Until then, the United States will take the necessary actions to protect the U.S. and international financial systems from this type of misconduct.”
In the fall, the U.S. unsealed an indictment against the head of an Irish Republican Army splinter group alleging that “quantities of the supernote were manufactured in, and under auspices of the government of, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” as North Korea is formally known. North Korea’s government in Pyongyang strenuously denied wrongdoing.
A report by North Korea’s official news service called the charges “a clumsy and base political farce” by a Bush administration intent on toppling the communist government.
David L. Asher, an administration point man on North Korean issues until this summer, said there was overwhelming evidence that Pyongyang had become a brazen “criminal state” reliant on illicit activity, in part to finance its nuclear weapons program.
“This is state-sponsored counterfeiting. I don’t know of any other case like this except the Nazis, and they were doing it in a state of war,” said Asher, who headed the administration’s North Korea Working Group and was the State Department’s senior advisor for East Asian and Pacific affairs.
The administration, he said, has made a strategic decision to press the issue, even if doing so affects delicate six-nation talks aimed at getting North Korea to give up its nuclear arms.
“The administration made a determination early on that irrespective of what happened in diplomacy, this should not be tolerated,” Asher said.
U.S. authorities say the increasingly high-profile campaign against the counterfeiting is proceeding amid information that North Korea is minting more American currency than ever before and smuggling it and other contraband, such as weapons and knockoff pharmaceuticals, directly into the United States. A number of U.S. officials who are knowledgeable about the campaign spoke on condition of anonymity because of the issue’s political sensitivity.
U.S. authorities fear that the communist state has been able to step up its illicit activities by forging more alliances with transnational organized crime syndicates.
Those alliances have made Pyongyang’s suspected nuclear arsenal and other weapons more vulnerable to theft by rogue elements of the North Korean government and sale to nuclear traffickers or terrorists, the U.S. officials said. They worry that the same pipelines used to smuggle fake currency into the United States could be used to traffic in weapons of mass destruction.
An unclassified version of a March report to U.S. lawmakers by the independent research arm of Congress warned that North Korea’s increasing reliance on criminal networks meant it may not be able to curtail its illegal activities even if it wanted to.
“Korean crime-for-profit activity,” analyst Raphael Pen of the Congressional Research Service wrote, “may become a ‘runaway train,’ gaining momentum, but out of control.”
Extending the Network
One of the first places authorities picked up the supernotes’ frail was Ireland, more than 5,000 miles away from North Korea. By the early 1990s, so many supemotes were circulating there that Irish banks stopped exchanging American $100 bills.
The Secret Service soon homed in on Sean Garland, whose exploits with the Irish Republican Army years earlier had made him a local hero.
Garland was chief of staff of the Official Irish Republican Army, or Old IRA, after it split with other IRA factions in 1969 and became the most left-leaning. He also heads its political wing, the Irish Workers’ Party, in Northern Ireland. In that capacity, Garland traveled extensively to see Socialist and Communist party leaders in the Soviet bloc and, authorities contend, North Korea.
According to Garland’s indictment in federal court in Washington this year, which was unsealed this fall, his discussions with North Korean operatives eventually turned from a shared rejection of capitalism to a scheme for him to buy bogus $100 bills, perhaps to destabilize the U.S. dollar by flooding the market with fakes.
The former North Korean chemist, who spoke anonymously for fear of reprisal, said that over the years, people from China, Hong Kong, Japan and other countries helped distribute the bills. “There was a lot of cooperation with Ireland,” he said.
In the indictment and in interviews, U.S. authorities said Garland ultimately teamed up with Old IRA members, street crooks and an alleged former member of the KGB, the Soviet intelligence service. They said the men traveled widely to circulate the bills and sell them to customers who would buy suitcases full at wholesale prices.
The indictment accuses Garland and six other men of buying, selling and circulating fake U.S. $100 bills during the l990s. Authorities say they passed up to $28 million worth of bogus currency.
From 1997 to 2000, the group bought, sold and circulated the counterfeit notes in Russia, Belarus, Poland, Denmark, the Czech Republic and Germany, the indictment says. It alleges, in detail, that couriers made frequent ferry trips to Ireland loaded down with real cash to pay Garland for the counterfeits.
Authorities said Garland did much of his business with North Korean suppliers at Pyongyang’s embassies in Moscow and, later, Minsk, Belarus, using his status as a Workers’ Party official as cover.
Things began to unravel in 1999, when Garland’s group allegedly went ahead with a deal to sell $1 million in supernotes to a pair of undercover agents posing as wholesalers.
Authorities in Britain described the counterfeit ring as the largest of its kind in their country’s history. But Garland wasn’t arrested or charged until British authorities, acting on a U.S. warrant, took the 71-year-old into custody Oct. 7 in a hotel in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
U.S. Takes Action
The U.S. quickly moved to extradite Garland. But when he was released for medical treatment, he fled to Ireland, which has no extradition treaty with the U.S.
In a recent statement, Garland insisted that the U.S. charges were baseless and politically motivated. He vowed in an Internet posting to surrender for trial if it were by a jury in Ireland.
No North Korean citizens or front organizations are charged or even identified in the Garland indictment. U.S. authorities would not say whether any of the 10 unnamed and unindicted coconspirators listed in the document were from North Korea.
Charming Phillips, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, would not comment on why authorities waited until this year to obtain a grand jury indictment, which alleges criminal acts only through mid-2000. He also would not say whether other suspects from North Korea or elsewhere had been identified or charged under seal.
“I can only say that the case is continuing,” Phillips said.
The chemist, though, said the counterfeit bills were routinely used by North Korean officials.
“Any North Korean official who goes abroad has to change a big note and bring back small, real currency,” he said. “If you come back with real money, you get medals.”
When he decided to flee North Korea in 2000, he crossed into China with thousands of dollars in counterfeit notes, he said. When Chinese police caught him without official papers, they kept $4,000 of the fake cash and let him go.
“Thanks to that money,” he said, “my translator and I were released.”
Besides the Garland case, U.S. officials say three criminal cases the Justice Department is pursuing offer evidence that North Korea is intensiing its efforts to chum out fake U.S. money and conspire with organized crime to smuggle the bills and counterfeit drugs and other products into the United States.
None of those cases explicitly mentions North Korea, but they refer to a foreign country that several U.S. sources say is North Korea.
One case involves supernotes, drug trafficking and three suspected members of a Chinese crime syndicate who were arrested in the Mariana Islands last year.
According to federal court documents and interviews, the Justice Department’s central money- laundering section continues to present evidence in the case to a federal grand jury.
In the two other cases, dubbed Operation Smoking Dragon and Operation Royal Charm, at least 87 people have been arrested or indicted in New Jersey and California on charges of smuggling or conspiring to smuggle at least $6 million in counterfeit cash, knockoff viagra, brand-name cigarettes and weapons into the United States from “Country A” and “Country B.”
Several U.S. officials said those countries were North Korea and China and that the money was printed by the North Korean government.
One of the alleged ringleaders, Co Khanh Tang, told undercover agents in April that he was expecting an especially lucrative product from suppliers in China: “new and better samples” of counterfeit U.S. currency, the indictment against him says.
Stuart Levey, a top Treasury Department official, said North Korea recently began churning out improved copies of U.S. bills.
In October, Levey headed a Treasury delegation to Beijing, Macao and Hong Kong, where he pressed government officials and banking executives for more help in cracking down on North Korean counterfeiters and banks that helped them.
Just before the trip, the Treasury Department designated an Asian financial institution, Macaobased Banco Delta Asia SARL, as a “primary money-laundering concein” under the Patriot Act.
U.S. authorities allege that the bank was a longtime pawn of North Korean front companies, which used it to conduct ‘illegal activities, including distributing counterfeit currency and smuggling counterfeit tobacco products” and aid North Korean drug-trafficking efforts.
The bank denied any intentional wrongdoing and later cut off several dozen clients — including 40
North Korean people and businesses — replaced several managers and allowed a panel named by
Macao’s government to administer its operations.
The U.S. sanctions on the bank, as well as those against several North Korean companies accused
of helping proliferate weapons of mass destruction, have inthriated North Korea. The nation is threatening to boycott disarmament talks unless the United States reverses course. The Smoking Dragon case has raised concerns beyond counterfeiting.
In court documents, prosecutors allege that Tang and another suspect offered undercover FBI agents a catalog of weapons available for purchase from the arsenals of at least two foreign countries, believed to be North Korea and China.
The agents ordered dozens of AK-47 assault rifles and in July 2004 began negotiating a deal for surface-to-air missiles “manufactured by communist countries,” an indictment said.
The indictment added that the agents were told the weapons’ high prices were “necessitated by the need to bribe officials” of at least one of the foreign governments.
Asher, the former State Department official, asserted in a November speech at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington that absent a worldwide crackdown on North Korean counterfeiting and the government’s other illicit activities, the country would continue to rely on criminal profits to maintain its political isolation and its nuclear program and to withstand pressure to reform.
“Given that periodic exposure of illegal dealings by North Korean officials overseas in the past has not resulted in serious or lasting consequences,” Asher said, “Pyongyang may believe that an open door for global criminality exists.”
UNFAO
3/30/2005
FAO has sent a veterinary expert to Pyongyang/North Korea to obtain further information on the extent of the current avian influenza outbreak in the country and to offer assistance to control the bird flu virus.
Two additional FAO avian influenza experts from China and Australia will arrive in Pyongjang within the next days.
The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has informed FAO about bird flu outbreaks on two or three farms. In response, FAO has sent diagnostic kits for avian influenza to support national control efforts.
Poultry production is one of the few growing sectors in the country. The number of poultry is estimated at some 25.5 million in 2004, about two times higher than in 1997.
In the wake of serious food shortages, the supply of animal protein has been very limited in North Korea. The recovering poultry sector could contribute to improve the nutrition of the country’s population of around 22.5 million people by adding a valuable source of animal protein to their diets.
North Korea is one of the poorest countries in the world, with around 8 million chronically undernourished in 2000-2002.
The spread of the disease into North Korea underlines the need for close regional cooperation, FAO said. North Korea is already benefiting from a regional FAO project on avian influenza, shared with China, Mongolia and the Republic of Korea. The project assists in improving and upgrading veterinary laboratories as well as creating a network for the sharing of epidemiological information, and provision of equipment to control and prevent avian flu.
A national workshop on bird flu will be held soon in North Korea to improve awareness of the disease, and provide information on control methods, laboratory diagnosis and good farming practices. The workshop will be jointly organised by the government and FAO.
It is essential to fight the bird flu virus in poultry, free-range chickens and ducks, in order to reduce the risk of a human flu pandemic, the UN agency said.
BBC
3/27/2005
North Korea says it has had a first outbreak of the deadly bird flu virus.
The state Korean Central News Agency said no people had been infected but hundreds of thousands of chickens had been culled and the carcasses burned.
The agency only said that the outbreak was “recent” and occurred at “two or three” chicken farms. It did not specify the virus type.
The H5N1 virus has killed almost 50 people since its resurgence in South East Asia in December 2003.
Tight controls
KCNA said Hadang farm in Pyongyang, among the city’s largest, was one of the sites of the outbreak.
North Korea had previously said it was free of the virus that has struck many countries in south and east Asia.
South Korean news agency Yonhap earlier this month reported an outbreak at Hadang, prompting the World Health Organization (WHO) to ask the reclusive North for information.
The North has relied on food aid for more than a decade but imposes tight controls on foreign visitors and aid workers.
Experts fear the H5N1 virus could eventually combine with human flu and threaten a deadly pandemic.
There are suspected cases of the virus being passed between humans.
Seoul offers N Korea bird flu aid
BBC
3/28/2005
South Korea has said it is ready to help the North combat bird flu, after the isolated state publicly admitted on Sunday that it was fighting the virus.
Pyongyang has not asked Seoul for assistance, but a South Korean official said the official announcement appeared to indicate the North would accept aid.
The North says no people have been infected but hundreds of thousands of chickens have been culled.
Analysts warn that the virus could wipe out its fledgling chicken industry.
“North Korea, plagued by food shortages, has struggled to modernise and build facilities for the breeding and processing of chicken, a main source of animal protein,” Kwon Tae-jin, an expert on North Korean agriculture based in Seoul, told the South Korean Munhwa Ilbo newspaper.
The North has not specified the type of bird flu virus it is battling. The H5N1 virus has killed almost 50 people since its resurgence in South East Asia in December 2003.
The state Korean Central News Agency only said that the outbreak was “recent” and occurred at “two or three” chicken farms.
The World Health Organization (WHO), which has an office in Pyongyang, said it had been contacted by the North, and would co-ordinate counter-measures.
South Korea was to hold several meetings on Monday to decide on a strategy to help the North.
It has already put in place measures to prevent the spread of bird flu into the South, as rumours first surfaced of an outbreak in the North earlier this month.
South Korea has itself suffered several outbreaks of bird flu, but no human infections.
Experts fear the H5N1 virus could eventually combine with human flu and threaten a deadly pandemic.
There are suspected cases of the virus being passed between humans. So far, Vietnam has been the country hardest hit by this year’s outbreak of bird flu.
UN bird flu expert visits N Korea
BBC
3/30/2005
A senior United Nations bird flu expert has gone to North Korea to try to prevent the spread of the virus.
North Korea confirmed on Saturday that bird flu had been detected in several farms near the capital, Pyongyang.
State media said hundreds of thousands of chickens had been destroyed to prevent the virus from spreading, and no humans had been affected.
The UN has also sent diagnostic kits to help the North Koreans determine if the birds died from the deadly H5N1 strain.
This strain of bird flu has killed almost 50 people since its resurgence in South East Asia in December 2003.
Hans Wagner, a senior official from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, flew to Pyongyang on Tuesday, and will be joined by two other experts from China and Australia in the coming days.
Survivor’s story
“They will look at the strategies being set up by the government and also bring some supplies,” FAO spokesman Diderik de Vleeschauwer told Reuters news agency.
South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported on Tuesday that the North Korean authorities were struggling to control the outbreak, and the disease was spreading quickly.
Analysts warn that the virus could wipe out the poverty-stricken country’s chicken industry.
Before the bird flu outbreak, poultry production was one of the few growing sectors in North Korea. The number of poultry was estimated at 25.5m in 2004, about two times higher than in 1997.
N Korean bird flu ‘different’
BBC
4/5/2005
A strain of bird flu infecting poultry in North Korea is different from that which killed scores of people in other parts of Asia, a UN expert has said.
Hans Wagner, an official for the Food and Agriculture Organization, said the birds were infected with the H7 strain.
The strain that has decimated poultry stocks and caused recent human deaths in Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam is the more virulent H5N1 strain.
North Korea has culled 219,000 birds to tackle the outbreak, Mr Wagner said.
“We have a new situation, because H7 has so far not occurred in Asia,” he told reporters.
“We don’t know where the virus came from,” he said, adding that UN experts would now try to trace the source of the infection, to prevent future outbreaks.
H7 can cause illness in humans, but outbreaks of the strain have not been as severe as those caused by H5N1.
H5N1 has killed almost 50 people since its resurgence in South East Asia in December 2003.
When North Korea first announced that three of its farms had been infected with bird flu last month, analysts warned that the virus could wipe out the poverty-stricken country’s chicken industry.
Poultry production is one of the few growing sectors in North Korea, which has relied on foreign aid to feed its people since the mid-1990s.
Asia Times
Aidan Foster-Carter
March 15, 2005
It’s a cliche to complain how little we really know about North Korea. Hard facts, and especially figures, are indeed hard – as in hard to come by.
In some fields this is perfectly true. The military, obviously. Does North Korean leader Kim Jong-il have the bomb or bombs? How many? Where is he hiding them? All countries keep that kind of information secret.
But no other nation in the world fails to publish any regular statistics about its economy. This 40-year silence should temper hype about market reforms. Without numbers, neither local enterprises nor external donors or (they wish) investors can do more than gamble in the dark. They really do need to know. Providing accurate numbers is a basic prerequisite of being a modern state.
Yet North Korea possesses a Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS), and it is not idle. No doubt the Dear Leader demands economic data – for his eyes only. But in some fields, the CBS does publish its work. One example was North Korea’s 1993 census, its first ever.
More recently the CBS has worked with international aid agencies to collect information that the latter need in a key area: hunger and its human consequences. The latest fruits of such cooperation have just been published in the “DPRK 2004 Nutrition Assessment Survey”, a joint product of the Central Bureau of Statistics and North Korea’s Institute of Child Nutrition (ICN), with financial and technical help from United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the United Nations World Food Program (WFP). The two chief consultants were from Australia and Vietnam, so this was a regional Asian effort. It follows earlier surveys carried out at two-year intervals, in 1998, 2000 and 2002.
It was the WFP that released this report, at a press conference in Beijing on March 7. It is in fact dated November 2004; the survey itself was carried out in October. The delay wasn’t explained. Perhaps the lag was attributable to translation time and to make sure it was fit for publication generally.
I’m often critical of North Korea, so all the more reason to give credit when it’s due. This is an impressive, highly professional report comprising 104 pages, five chapters, 46 tables, 24 figures. The sample was 4,800 children, ages up to six, and 2,109 mothers of children under two, drawn evenly from seven of North Korea’s nine provinces plus the capital, Pyongyang.
Having taught social science research methods in a former life, I get a kick out of reading about random and cluster sampling (sad, I know). Then I pinch myself. This is North Korea. An official document! All these numbers! And on a potentially very sensitive subject, too.
For what this survey measures, with grim precision, is what years of hunger have done to the bodies of small children – and I do mean small – and their mothers in North Korea.
To be technical, there are three main criteria:
*Underweight (for age) is self-explanatory;
*Stunting, low height for age, signals chronic malnutrition;
*Wasting, worst of all, is low weight relative to height, indicating acute malnutrition. Each of these categories is sub-divided into mild and severe cases. For the mothers, a fourth measure was used: MUAC (mid-upper arm circumference). Less than 22.5 centimeters means they aren’t eating enough.
So how are Juche’s (juche is the policy of self-reliance) children faring? The WFP’s press release tried to look on the bright side. Since the last survey in 2002, the proportion of young children chronically malnourished (stunted) is down from 42% to 37%. Acute malnutrition (wasting) eased from 9% to 7%. But those underweight rose from 21% to 23% – though for children under the age of two, those most at risk, this fell from 25% to 21%. One in five children had diarrhea, and one in eight showed symptoms of acute respiratory infection. But mothers have made no progress: a third were anemic and malnourished, the same figure as two years ago. Vitamin A deficiency is common.
Much depends on where people are living. Things are less bad in Pyongyang and in the southwestern Hwanghae farming region than in bleak northeasterly Hamgyong and Ryanggang provinces. Ryanggangites get to eat meat, fish or eggs just once every three weeks on average. Chagang in the far mid-north is bleaker still, but North Korea doesn’t allow access to this area – probably because of military bases located there. Thus, no survey was conducted in Chagang, which means no food aid either; the WFP is strict about that – surveys first.
Even at the national level, the few slight improvements offer scant comfort. The more than one-third (37%) of North Korean’s under six who are stunted – and especially the one in eight (12%) who are severely stunted – will grow up stunted and stay that way. Even once Korea is reunified politically, they will stand out physically: dwarfed by their Southern peers.
Seoul, meanwhile, has different – nay, opposite – child health issues. With uncanny timing, the very same day as the WFP released its survey on the North, education officials in the Southern capital reported that one in 10 schoolchildren in Seoul is overweight. Obesity rates are growing fast, too. As the old adage has it, the rich slim while the poor starve.
Back in the North, the WFP doesn’t appear to be leaving any time soon. Richard Ragan, head of the program’s Pyongyang office – and an American, to boot – said he hopes the agency will shut up shop one day, once the government and the private sector can stand on their own feet.
But for now, one anniversary a proud North Korea won’t be celebrating, is that this year marks a whole decade since it first, reluctantly, asked the WFP and other agencies for help coping with flood and famine. While the worst of the famine has eased, food self-sufficiency – in a country so mountainous that this is a ludicrous goal anyway – looks as remote as ever.
So still, in 2005, the WFP has extended the begging bowl for Kim Jong-il – whose own priorities evidently lie elsewhere. Ever prickly Pyongyang has bitten the kind hand trying to feed it, forbidding UN agencies to launch their usual formal consolidated aid appeal this year. Nonetheless the WFP is seeking $202 million with which to buy 504,000 tonnes of food, mainly grains.
And no wonder. In January North Korea cut its Public Distribution System (PDS) rations to starvation level: 250 grams of cereal per person per day, the lowest in five years. Such cutbacks don’t usually happen until March, when last year’s crop typically runs out. This is all the more odd, since 2004’s autumn harvest is thought to have been the best in years.
Luckily, the WFP currently has enough stocks – as it did not, in the recent past – to feed all of its target group: a staggering 6.5 million North Koreans, or nearly one-third of the entire population. The main categories within this group are 2.7 million children from birth to the age of 10 and 2.15 million people in food or work programs. Other beneficiaries include 900,000 elderly, 300,000 pregnant women and nursing mothers, and 350,000 in low-income households. The latter are a new category: victims of the post-2002 reforms that have seen inequalities widen, even as the state retreats ever further from providing any help to the millions of citizens whom its disastrous past and half-baked present policies have starved and stunted.
That’s my take, not the WFP’s. Diplomacy precludes any such critique from a UN body. Yet the raw data, the results – written indelibly on the bodies of innocent children, marked for life – are there for all to see. It’s ironic, but the same regime that branded this suffering on its people is at least now registering and owning up to the outcome: collating and publishing these damning data, putting its name to the survey, and signing off on it. That’s a start.
Where his statisticians boldly go, will the Dear Leader follow? It’s so simple. Ditch nukes; watch aid explode instead. Let the children eat, and grow. If not, what future is there?
The GAVI Alliance (formerly known as the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation) is a public-private partnership focused on increasing children’s access to vaccines in poor countries. Partners include the GAVI Fund, national governments, UNICEF, WHO, The World Bank, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the vaccine industry, public health institutions and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). The GAVI Fund provides resources for the Alliance programs. The Alliance provides a forum for partners to agree upon mutual goals, share strategies, and coordinate efforts.
In 2004, The GAVI Alliance commissioned a data quality audit of the North Korean immunisation system to facilitate future collaboration. The audit was designed to assist countries receiving support to improve their information systems, and aid with accuracy in reporting.
The report is saved to this website here:DQA_2004_KoreaDPR.pdf
On the web, it is located here.
The results of the audit are not surprising given the centrally-planned nature of the North Korean health bureaucracies combined with their penchant for secrecy. I recommend reading the full report to get an idea of how efficient of how socialist institutions are with data, but here are some points I considered interesting:
-District immunization information is not passed on to the national level, but combined at the county level.
-Out of 206 counties, 168 were audited. The rest were excluded for “security reasons”.
-The Ministry of population and Health contains a National Hygeing Control Committee, which controls the National Hygeine and Anti-Epidemic Institute which is responsible for the Expanded Programme on Immunization. This program was supported by UNICEF and the WHO.
-Officially, immunizations are offered in all 206 counties to children under one year old. Records are suposed to be made on an individual’s Child Health Card, and in the doctor’s own ledgers. These health cards are stored at local health facilities and are supposed to move with the child. Immunizations are distributed by the national government and are carried out one day per month.
-Outside of the national level, where one computer was used to for entering data, no computers were seen (all done by hand).
-In cases of county data, many errors were detected in the addition of monthly subtotals which could not be explained by the district staff. The auditors concluded that the district used the 2003 figures rather than admit to missing 2002 data to meet the criteria of the audit.
-County managers do not take the previous year’s achievements into account in order to set realistic targets for the next year.
-Supervision of immunization activities was weak. Only two counties could provide a written schedule of supervision.
-One health unit destroyed its records.
BBC
Alex Kirby
8/27/2004
[NKeconWatch: Here is the report- DPRK_SOE_Report.pdf]
The UN and officials in Pyongyang have agreed the first-ever assessment of the state of the North Korean environment.
The report was written by North Korea’s national co-ordinating council for the environment, together with the UN’s Development and Environment Programmes.
The head of Unep said Pyongyang had shown its readiness to work with the world community to safeguard nature.
The report lists a catalogue of neglect and over-exploitation of resources, and says time is short to put things right.
The report, DPR Korea: State Of The Environment 2003, was produced by officials from 20 government and academic agencies, with training and guidance from the two UN programmes.
Future collaboration
It was compiled as a result of a visit to Pyongyang in 2000 by Unep’s executive director, Dr Klaus Toepfer.
He and Dr Ri Jung Sik, secretary-general of the national co-ordinating council, have now signed a framework agreement on joint activities to improve environmental protection.
The report covers five areas: forests, water, air, land and biodiversity. It says the most urgent priority is the degradation of forest resources.
Forests cover 74% of North Korea, but almost all are on steep slopes. In the last decade the forests have declined in extent and quality.
The report says this is because of timber production, a doubling of firewood consumption, wild fires, insect attacks associated with drought, and conversion of forest to farmland.
On water it says demand is rising “with economic development and the improvement in standards of living”, and calls for urgent investment in domestic sewage and industrial water treatment.
It notes that large quantities of untreated wastewater and sewage are discharged into rivers, and says some diseases related to water use “are surging”.
Air quality, the report says, “is deteriorating, especially in urban and industrial areas”. Energy consumption is expected to double over 30 years, from almost 48m tonnes of oil equivalent in 1990 to 96 million tonnes in 2020.
North Korea’s use of coal is projected to increase five times from 2005 to 2020, underlining, the report says, “the urgent need for clean coal combustion and exhaust gas purification technologies, energy efficiency, and renewable energy alternatives.”
On land use, the report says self-sufficiency in food production has been a national policy aim in North Korea.
Changed priorities
But it continues: “Major crop yields fell by almost two thirds during the 1990s due to land degradation caused by loss of forest, droughts, floods and tidal waves, acidification due to over-use of chemicals, as well as shortages of fertiliser, farm machinery and oil.
“Vulnerable soils require an expansion of restorative policies and practices such as flood protection works, tree planting, terracing and use of organic fertilisers.
“Recognising such issues, [the country] adjusted its legal and administrative framework, designating environmental protection as a priority over all productive practices and identifying it as a prerequisite for sustainable development.”
North Korea is home to several critically endangered species, among them the Amur leopard, the Asiatic black bear and the Siberian tiger.
Squaring the circle
It has signed up to international environmental agreements such as the Convention on Biological Diversity, though the report notes a continuing “contradiction between protection and development”, which it says is being overcome.
In a wider context, the report says: “The conflict between socio-economic progress and a path of truly sustainable development is likely to be further aggravated unless emerging issues can be settled in time.”
It says environmental laws and regulations need to be formulated or upgraded, management mechanisms improved, financial investment encouraged, and research focused on priorities.
Dr Toepfer said North Korea “has shown its willingness to engage with the global community to safeguard its environmental resources, and we must respond so it can meet development goals in a sustainable manner.”
