By Park Sung-hee
Heavy rains have pounded various parts of North Korea recently from July 12, causing numerous casualties, flooding homes, farming areas and roads, according to the North Korean news agency Saturday.
This has raised fresh concerns of food supply in the already impoverished North Korea.
A report by the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), the state news agency of North Korea, stated that “the downpour affected at least 15,000 hectares of farmland,” and among them “10,000 hectares were completely engulfed by the rainwater.”
Areas that were most largely affected in North Korea were the North and South Hwanghae Provinces which saw more than 250 millimeters of heavy rains.
This rainfall affected more than 3,000 hectares of farmlands in the South Hwanghae Province, and at least 5,900 hectares of farmlands in the North Hwanghae Province.
Yet this is not the end to North Korea’s rain forecast. The seasonal rain front, which unleashed torrential rain mainly in the southern parts of the Korean Peninsula, is about to head up to the north starting today.
North Korea and its millions of people are currently in the throes of another major famine, similar to the one they faced in the late 90s; though this one apparently is so severe that it is not only the children, many of them orphans, that are begging for scraps of food on the streets, but the normally well-fed army that is starving as well.
As the food shortage in the impoverished country is a chronic problem, “fighting hunger is becoming the very battle that soldiers face daily,” according to the newsletter of North Korea published on Wednesday by Good Friends, an organization dedicated to protecting peace and human rights, especially on the Korean peninsula.
An increasing number of North Korean soldiers have shown “absence without leave” (AWOL) behaviors to search for food and avoid intense military training.
This becomes a great issue as the effect trickles down to farmers and inhabitants in the region who the soldiers steal food from. Just last month, a soldier in North Hwanghae Province killed a farmer for potatoes as the farmer resisted against him according to Yonhap.
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