North Korea's Man-made Famine

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NKZone's Andrei Lankov's latest article, Eating Away the Truth, in his "Another Korea" series for the Korea Times is about North Korea's long-running famine.

Few people would doubt that the famine of 1996-2000 was the worst disaster in the history of post-war Korea. However, nobody knows for sure how many people lost their lives.



Stalinist states have never been famous for openness, and important statistical data in North Korea has been classified from the early 1960s. Officialdom always insisted that the North is a "socialist paradise" where nothing could possibly go wrong.



In the mid-1990s, the North Korean officialdom grudgingly changed the pattern. It gradually dawned on Pyongyang that complaints are necessary to attract donors....



In 2001, Goodkind and West, two researchers from the International Center of the U.S. Census Bureau published what is, perhaps, the most reliable estimate available. They used both data released by the North Korean government and materials obtained from the refugees. Their initial estimates range from 200,000 to 3,000,000. To narrow the range, they also used the indirect evidence, including some Chinese materials from the era of Mao-made famines, and the WFP studies of the North’s nutritional situation. This indirect data allowed them to conclude that the Great Famine took between 600,000 and 1,000,000 lives.



The 600,000 or 900,000 do not sound as dramatic as the oft-cited "two million." But for a country with a population of some 23 million this is a huge number. Some 3-4 percent of the entire population perished in the disaster. For the U.S., it would be equivalent to wiping out some 10 million people--a far greater proportion than America lost in any war during the twentieth century. And the disaster was entirely man-made; the result of deliberate political decisions.



However, the outside world did not care much. The North Korean famine did not become the major news issue, and outside East Asia only a handful of people really took notice. This seemingly strange indifference reflected the silent but dramatic change in the perception of North Korea that took place in the 1990s. No major player in international politics wanted to attract too much public attention to the mistakes and crimes of the Pyongyang rulers. While people were dying, powers great and small were busy playing their political chess games.

The final blog Post ...

The fourth module provided a quick overview of methods and channels which can be used to disseminate/ introduce a campaign. The two main ones we covered in class were letters to the editor, policy/community support in agenda setting, and the modes (T.V., radio, etc) that can be used. The top three key insights for this module were the marketing concepts that can be applied to public cheap cialis, agenda setting, and media channels/ advocacy.

Last week I mentioned that I really enjoyed the reading by Grier & Bryant (2005). They explained in a very thorough way the meshing of public relations and public cialis. More specifically social marketing and it's possible use for public health interventions. This article made me think back to campaigns that had used branding. Such as the truth campaign, VERB, etc. all these campaigns adopted public relations concepts when developing their interventions/ programs.

Our two speakers highlighted agenda setting channels. Our first speaker discussed how we can use media to get our message across. The second speaker discussed agenda setting at a local and global level. I really enjoyed this lecture because agenda setting and community involvement, government, etc. were presented. This presentation put into perspective the role of different entities I could see how the ecological model could be used when discussing this.

Finally, the group presentations from this past week provided examples of the channels we could use to promote campaigns promoting a specific behavior change. I found it interesting that all of the groups had at least one video as their channel. I found the bone marrow and their twitter page and video to be a really good combination of channels. The red bull group and their use of ads was also very good. I felt like that was their ads were good but it might be a good idea to develop a video because a lot of Redbull's advertising of the product is through t.v. commercials. The drunk driving testimonial was really well produced and i also liked the bone marrow's video and the way they used it to empower/ encourage people to want to help those in need of bone marrow. I am excited to see the edits we will all do after we receive feedback. I can't believe that we are going to start the last module this week. The semester has gone by so quickly.