NKorea says floods caused massive crop losses
Pastor Dale Morgan
NKorea says floods caused massive crop losses*
AFP - Wednesday, August 15
SEOUL (AFP) - - North Korea, already dependent on foreign aid to feed
its people, said Wednesday that devastating floods have washed away more
than a tenth of its annual grain harvest.
Aid agencies said up to 300,000 people were believed hit by the worst
floods in a decade, which would worsen already severe food shortages in
the impoverished communist nation.
Official media has said torrential rains from August 7-12 caused "huge
human and material damage."
The North has reported hundreds dead or missing and more than 30,000
houses for over 63,300 families destroyed, along with at least 800
public buildings and more than 540 bridges and sections of railway.
"Unprecedented torrential rains ... are throwing a shadow over prospects
for agricultural production," agriculture ministry director Ri Jae-Hyon
said in a statement carried by the Korean Central News Agency.
As of Tuesday more than 11 percent of rice and maize fields nationwide
had been submerged, buried or washed away, he added, along with 200
pumping stations.
More than 2,000 breaches were reported in waterways and riverbanks.
"This is a significant emergency crisis," said Paul Risley, regional
spokesman for the UN's World Food Programme, which currently feeds
750,000 North Koreans, with plans to expand this to 1.9 million by next
month.
"It is possible the floods affected 200,000 to 300,000 individuals."
Risley said a WFP staffer and other UN officials travelled Tuesday to a
region north of the capital Pyongyang after the North made a preliminary
request for assistance.
"There were indications of widespread damage and the dislocation of
several communities, and clear evidence of the need for emergency food
assistance and probable long-term food assistance," he said by telephone
from Bangkok.
"The chief concern is to begin distribution of emergency food and then
get a sense of how much farmland is lost."
The acting head of delegation for the International Federation of Red
Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), Terje Lysholm, said the floods
which covered six provinces were the worst in a decade.
He told AFP by phone from Pyongyang that IFRC teams were still gathering
information but that at least 14,000 houses had been confirmed destroyed
in the two worst-hit areas alone.
At least 100,000 hectares (247,000 acres) of farmland were inundated.
"This will affect crops for this year... and it will have a impact on
the total food situation in the coming years," he said.
North Korea faced a food shortfall this year of one million tonnes, or
20 percent of its needs, even before the floods hit. The nation suffered
a famine in the mid- to late 1990s which killed hundreds of thousands of
people.
Risley said diplomats and aid agencies were to be given tours of
inundated areas Wednesday, adding that the speed with which the trips
had been organised indicated the government's concern.
"This is a quite different approach than during the floods one year
ago," he said.
North Korea has reportedly mobilised its 1.1 million-member military to
work on recovery in the southwest, South's Korea's Yonhap news agency said.
Damage "seems serious enough to put its military troops on emergency
footing," it quoted a Seoul government source as saying.
The North's state media have given unusually detailed accounts of
damage. Television has broadcast scenes of residents in the showpiece
capital wading waist-high.
North Korea frequently reports severe damage during Korea's rainy
season. Experts say decades of reckless deforestation, for fuel or to
clear hillsides for planting, have stripped it of tree cover.
"Farmers plant up the sides of slopes because there is a desperate need
for greater farmland and these practices cause greater erosion when it
rains," said Risley.
"Deforestation is a critical factor (in flooding) and the government is
aware of this."