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A constantly recurring question is how decades of chronic food insecurity interspersed with food emergencies and even outright famine may affect the long-term physical and mental health of the North Korean people. Since we cannot do direct scientific study of the North Korean population, thinking on this issue is by its very nature speculative. One way [...]
A few items came to our attention that warrant bundling into a “count your blessings” post for the holiday week. First up, UNICEF has issued a press release—but not the full report—on its recent nutrition survey. The survey is national in scope, and was a joint venture between domestic agencies and UNICEF, the World Food [...]
The release of the 2008 North Korean census has generated a “second wave” of famine death estimates. In previous posts I reviewed work by Dan Goodkind, Loraine West, and Peter Johnson at the U.S. Census Bureau, the South Korean government, and Thomas Spoorenberg and Daniel Schwekendiek. All three studies tended to generate slightly lower estimates of [...]
The International Food Policy Research Institute has long been a leading organization in tracking innovations in agriculture and food security issues. One of its flagship publications is The Global Hunger Index, which comes in report form and in a useful online interactive edition. The index—which theoretically runs from 0-100 but in fact has a range [...]
Most of the food consumed in North Korea is produced locally and as a consequence weather has a considerable impact on food availability. Yet the importance of weather can be exaggerated, and has sometimes been used politically, as means to sidestep concerns about North Korean policy and instead move directly to attributing food shortages to [...]
While reviewing the latest UN Overview of Needs and Assistance in DPRK report [pdf]—see our overview posted Monday—we came on an interesting table that contained updates on childhood nutrition status. The update contains 2009 information from the UNICEF led Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey [pdf]. The measure of childhood nutrition status is the percentage of children [...]
Former Congressman Tony Hall had a notable career as a legislator and activist on behalf of the world’s poor, and we have to confess, he has shamed us more than a bit. For those who don’t know about Hall, he served as a representative for Dayton for 24 years, and took a particular interest in [...]
Two common misconceptions about famines are that (1) people starve to death (2) and because there is not enough food to go around. In reality, (1) people normally succumb to other maladies before they literally starve, and (2) there is usually enough food to go around. But in market economies famine victims do not have [...]
In earlier posts we reviewed analyses by Dan Goodkind, Loraine West, and Peter Johnson and by the South Korean government on famine mortality. These studies used the North Korean censuses of 1993 and 2008 to generate new estimates of deaths during the 1990s, and concluded that famine deaths were lower than previously thought (including in [...]
A familiar trope of the North Korean famine literature is the assertion that the event would have significant long-term effects on the physical and mental capacities of individuals who were nutritionally deprived as children. While the notion has enormous intuitive plausibility, I know of no actual evidence on the North Korean case, and studies of [...]
