North Korea, for years on the edge of famine, has crossed that edge and dropped into the abyss. Food is rationed to one-fifth the necessary amount for survival. UNICEF has stated that 80,000 children are in "imminent peril" of starvation, and up to 5 million people could starve to death. Awful climatic conditions - flooding ironically coupled with terrible drought - have virtually eliminated this nation's crop store.
Climate alone has never fully explained starvation. Climate requires a partner, politics, and the two have always gone hand in hand to form a demon that slays millions. In China, the tag-team of flooding and drought combined with the least well-thought-out economic policies in history to kill thirty million people by starvation from 1958-1961, and another few million by politics alone, when they pointed out to Mao Zedong how inane it was to play politics while people starved.
Even in arid Ethiopia in the 1980s, the nation was able, theoretically, to produce enough food. But warring factions stole most of it to feed their armies while vying for control of their dying land. This same thing has occurred over and over again, like that nightmare where you can see the monsters coming for you but you can't move your feet. Liberia. Chad. Angola. Rwanda, Burundi, and Zaire. And that's just in the last ten years.
Once, the West, filled with grain surpluses and good intentions, sang a few sympathetic songs. There won't be Christmas in Africa this year, so let's send them some food. The effort did raise money, and the West did send food, which was promptly stolen by the warlords. More food was sent - hey, there's plenty for everyone - and it sat on the docks, rotting, because the warlords had stolen the transport trucks, too. They played at politics, while their people starved.
In Somalia, the West sent more food, more trucks, and this time they also sent some soldiers to guard the trucks which drive the food. The warlords shot the soldiers, and the US decided that maybe those poor starving Africans weren't worth American lives after all. This time, the Americans played with politics, and let Somalia starve.
And now, the monster is racing toward us again, although once again, it's not racing at us, per se, it's racing at them. This time, the "them" is the North Koreans, who are facing a disaster on the scale that made Michael Jackson sing for other people's supper a decade and a half ago.
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