G9 North Korea, A Humanitarian Crisis
January 11, 2019 - 9:30-11:30 am
Description: The deepening humanitarian emergency in North Korea is the least reported in the world. While insults traded between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un dominated headlines, North Korea’s severe food shortages, estimated to have left two in five of its population undernourished, received little attention from the world’s news outlets. About 18 million people in North Korea, 70% of the population, are estimated to rely on government food aid, according to the UN. The situation deteriorated last summer, when the country suffered its worst drought since 2001. Very few aid agencies are able to operate in the country, and independent media and civil society organizations are also prohibited. Even with one of the largest allocations of food aid in the world, almost a million tons annually, famine will persist; many North Koreans subsist on roots and edible grasses. The crisis is unfolding within one of the world’s most secretive, closed and inaccessible states, with a regime that appears impervious to the terrible conditions in which the bulk of North Koreans live. Outsiders who manage to work in the country, for the most part humanitarians, UN employees and, exceptionally, a few journalists, are extremely discreet about what they see. For aid organizations, this silence is perhaps understandable: given the nature of the regime, keeping quiet is crucial if aid work is to continue. Yet this silence masks a deeper manipulation of the conditions in the country, whereby human need is used to conceal political agendas, both by the regime in Pyongyang and by the key outside powers with an interest in maintaining it. Three times nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, former US Ambassador Tony Hall is one of the leading advocates for hunger relief programs and improving international human rights conditions around the world. He visited this illusive nation seven times since 1995, and was one of the first Western officials to see the famine outside of the capital, Pyongyang. What could possibly be done to provide relief for the people of North Korea?
Purpose: Get a rare glimpse inside this illusive country and gain even rarer insight into the humanitarian crisis unfolding there
Facilitator: Tony Hall
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