Grass soup rations cut in half again.
As North Korea heads toward the “barley hump” – the lean season before the rice and corn harvest in the summer – aid agencies are warning that an unusually dry winter is compounding chronic food shortages in the impoverished country.
And while North Korea may no longer be in a state of famine, malnutrition remains such a widespread problem that even slight changes in weather can have an outsized impact on ordinary people’s food supply.
“We’re concerned about seed scarcity and the low level rain and snowfall,” John Aylieff, deputy Asia director at the U.N.’s World Food Program, said from Pyongyang. “All of these things are raising concerns about the winter harvest this year.”
Winter crops – including wheat and barley – should be growing now, but after an exceptionally dry year in 2014, rainfall around the country has been markedly lower than usual so far this year, particularly in the “cereal bowl” provinces of Pyongan in the west and Hwanghae in the south.
Although the winter harvest makes up only 5 percent of North Korea’s domestic food supply, it is a critical time because the crops see the country through the lean season known locally as the barley hump – the period between May and August before rice and corn crops are harvested.
“If there is a big gap, this could prolong the lean season and it could prove a ’flash point’ for malnutrition,” Aylieff said.[…]
Allowing more freedom in the rural areas could increase people’s standard of living there – and potentially make the regime more stable.
Randall Ireson, a former agricultural adviser who worked for a nonprofit agency in North Korea for almost a decade, said the reforms did appear to be making a difference.
“We should be able to see more diverse crops at a local farm level,” he said, adding that North Korea was beginning to move away from its emphasis on rice and maize, and growing more soybeans.
But the changes do not yet constitute Chinese- or Vietnamese-style economic reform because North Koreans have no certainty about the officially state-owned land.
“If farmers believe that they can have these fields and farm them for at least the medium term future, they will be more likely to invest in improving the soil, but they need some assurance that the efforts they put in won’t go to waste,” Ireson said, noting that it could easily take three years to return the depleted soil to good health.