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The contradictory evidence with respect to conditions in North Korean continues with a report from AlertNet, a humanitarian news service run by the Thomson Reuters Foundation. An AlertNet reporter and Reuters photographers and video journalists spent a week in the South Hwanghae region that included visits to collective farms, orphanages, hospitals, rural clinics, schools and nurseries. Video is posted on the Alertnet site; the New York Times has a nicely organized slide-show on Kerri MacDonald's blog.
We did a quick check on the location of the AlertNet visit and it appears to be exactly where the Interagency Assessment Team went following the floods in July (see the maps posted on Reliefweb here).
In short, this is presumably the worst of the flood-damaged areas. But there is the additional complication that orphanages are--literally--at the bottom of the food chain. We continue to have concerns that the food situation has not fundamentally changed. But there can be no doubt that some shock value was intended by sending the Reuters team to an orphanage in a flood-hit area.
The broader issue is how to think about the disparate information coming out of the country. Bernard Seliger, resident representative of Hanns Seidel Foundation in Korea and a frequent visitor to North Korea, has a thoughtful European perspective on the dilemmas of reaching reasonable assessments on Leonid Petrov's blog. Andrei Lankov makes the case that Stalinism is dead and that North Korea is now a market economy.
But the missing link that puts the pieces together is inequality: regional, political and class. Positive assessments are driven by the emergence of new social forces benefiting from the market economy, no doubt with political connections. The horror stories come out of neglected or exploited regions, the politically suspect and those without access to the market and foreign exchange, such as institutionalized children.
