Search Results for: Ragan

James Brooke reports: The United Nations World Food Program, which was helping to feed a third of the 22 million people of North Korea as recently as August, has ended all feeding programs there at the request of the government. “Operations are completely halted,” Richard Ragan, an American who represents the agency in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, said Friday in a telephone interview. Noting that government pressure had already forced a cutback this fall, he said: “We were feeding...

Food Aid Update: “The World Food Program, a United Nations arm, will make a final decision next month on whether to shut down its office in North Korea’s capital city. Richard Ragan, the head of the relief agency’s office in Pyongyang, spoke by telephone to the JoongAng Ilbo yesterday. Mr. Ragan said his organization faces a choice between withdrawing and shifting the focus of its work in the North from food aid to longer-term agricultural development programs.”

Even last summer, with the World Food Program’s food aid flowing into North Korea, the country was suffering from food shortages. Today, North Korea’s frigid winter has set in, and the regime has almost completely evicted the WFP and the aid it provided. For thousands of North Korea’s underprivileged citizens–not counting the millions who starved for the sake of the regime’s nuclear buildup in the 1990’s–it is already too late. Yet the United Nations, through its anemic retreat from North...

An Appeal What follows is a status report on the most urgent, compelling human rights issue of all–what increasingly looks like the making of the next Great Famine. The last one, which took place in the 1990’s, killed approximately two million people. If you are in a position to take any kind of action–including something as modest as writing your member of Congress or posting a link on your own blog–this is my urgent appeal to raise public outrage to...

While most of the papers appear to be on the bandwagon as accepting that North Korea’s harvests are up by 10% this year, I strongly question that because of a dubious chain of transmission–one that originates with the North Korean government and has been “laundered” through the highly credulous Richard Ragan of the World Food Program. If you want to see dissenting views, here is one, and here is another from a person I know to be truthful and who...

Bill Richardson is the Governor of New Mexico, a former Secretary of Energy, a suspected presidential aspirant, and the latest of a series of highly intelligent men to make jaw-droppingly stupid pronouncements of diplomatic–and even humanitarian–optimism about North Korea. Richardson may well be a perfectly fine governor, but reasonable success at governance and bureaucracy in a society of laws and compromises does not necessarily qualify one to go eyeball-to-eyeball with bloody-minded sociopaths with nukes. Only in the foreign policy vacuum...

The New York Times, via the superb James Brooke, has published a lengthy and detailed report on North Korea’s growing food crisis, combined with its bizarre decision to cut off outside food aid. The regime, perhaps stung by the growing criticism and the negative reaction to its requests for “development aid” instead, took Brooke and dozens of others on a guided tour: “All people in the D.P.R.K. are now out to give helping hands to the farmers in harvesting,” the...

Either you believed North Korea’s markets and food price hikes represented reform, or you believed they represented the state’s attempt to stay ahead of the disintegration of its own failing system. To the extent there was reform, the L.A. Times reports that the experiment appears to be over: SEOUL — Rolling back some of its economic reforms, North Korea is banning the sale of rice and other grains at private markets and strengthening its old communist-style public distribution system under...

When it comes to North Korea, food aid is not our weapon. It’s already North Korea’s weapon. Our goal should be to feed as many innocent people as we possibly can, with or without the North Korean government’s cooperation. The distribution of food is the most important human rights issue of all. I’ve been tracking the reports of a return of famine conditions closely this year, but it wasn’t until several days about that I became convinced that North Korea...