North Korea's urban poor at bottom of the pile
Tue May 3, 2005
By Martin Nesirky
SEOUL (Reuters) - If North Korea is one of the world's most impoverished countries, then those living in cities in the isolated communist state are close to the bottom of the food chain.
Trapped between vicious inflation and uncertain paydays, the 60 percent of North Korea's 22.5 million people that aid workers estimate live in urban settings are a new underclass in a country where the daily food ration is equal to about two bowls of rice.
"New vulnerable groups are emerging because of economic changes," wrote Kathi Zellweger of the Catholic charity Caritas in a report outlining a $2.5 million appeal.
The outside perception might be that those groups most at risk were largely in the countryside. The reverse is true; urban poverty is a growing concern for aid workers. Yet despite the trend, few believe the poverty gap will cause social unrest.
Caritas says North Koreans in general are among the most marginalized people in the world because of the closed nature of their communist system. Stop-start economic reforms have pushed many further to the fringes, notably in cities.
"The gap between rich and poor is widening," Zellweger said. "There is little opportunity for such dense and urbanized populations to directly engage in food production."
Of course, poverty is a relative term in a country with a per capita income of $818 in 2003. That compared with $14,162 last year in unabashedly capitalist South Korea, Asia's third-largest economy and the North's neighbor below the heavily fortified Demilitarized Zone frontier that bisects the peninsula.
"Most urban residents are constantly living on the edge," said Richard Ragan of the World Food Program, which is studying the problem to work out how best to help further.
"They don't eat enough, and their diet is very narrow; typically cereal -- rice or maize -- and vegetable soup and kimchi. Very little protein. Very little fruit."
Kimchi is a Korean dish usually made from cabbage and radish.
Those most vulnerable in North Korea spend 70-80 percent of their meager wages on food, Ragan said in an e-mail interview. Runaway inflation means little is left for non-food items. Electricity is short. Homes are cold in winter.
RESOURCEFUL BUT DESPERATE
World Food Program assessments consistently show urban residents are at a disadvantage compared with those on the land, particularly cooperative farm families who get more than twice as much food because they are allowed to keep some of their crops.
Ever resourceful and often desperate, many North Koreans trade goods and gather wild foods such as grasses and acorns. But city dwellers have to forage further, almost always on foot, and compete with other city residents for the available flora.
Some city residents have plots of land. Many do not and have to rely on the Public Distribution System, which is the main source of staple food for 70 percent of the people but has all but collapsed as a reliable conduit because of crop shortfalls.
Others are getting an unexpected flavor of country life because they are being redeployed from idle factories to help on farms where fuel shortages mean most work is not mechanized.
Most have to trek to and from their city homes, and they do not necessarily benefit from the surplus crop handouts, which are a reform spin-off in the countryside. There is little upside from market reforms for average people in the cities.
At the other end of the scale, those in the political and military elite with access to hard currency have little trouble shopping at high-price markets and dining in new restaurants in Pyongyang, visitors to the North Korean capital say.
"The time of shared hardships is long gone," said the Brussels-based International Crisis Group in a report on the North's reforms. "North Koreans doing best now are the ones who are quickest to adapt to the new system, but most people inside and outside the bureaucracy are struggling to keep up."
Those struggling the most include the old, nursing mothers and children. Pyongyang is a showcase, although not immune to hardship. Regional cities, notably in the East, fare worse.
"The further you get from Pyongyang, the worse the poverty becomes," said Dong Yong-seung, head of the North Korea team at the Samsung Economic Research Institute.
An influx of South Korean video tapes and recorders, for example, has exposed many North Koreans to life outside their bubble. Word is also traveling faster these days about the positive market-reform effect on the elite. But if the rest of the people resent it, they have yet to show it.
Zellweger said most people were too busy figuring out how to find food or medicine to consider protests against the system.
"I don't know if there's much energy left to think about much else," she said by telephone from Hong Kong.
"It is also very hard to say when they reach the bottom line; how much belt-tightening they could do. They would say to us, 'We are used to a tough life. We can cope with this'."
(Additional reporting by Seo Hee-seung and Kim Yoo-chul)
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