Tuesday , March 19 2024
Home / EconoSpeak / The North Korea Food Shortage Deepens

The North Korea Food Shortage Deepens

Summary:
Yeah, I know, the Iran situation is more in the headlines, but nobody knows anything and everybody is shooting off their mouths.  I shall comment on that one when things settle down a bit.Instead I shall provide info less widely reported coming out of nkecon on the still-unreported-in-MSM story about the increasingly bad food situation in North Korea (DPRK). There are multiple reports.  Drought has hit the principal rice growing area in DPRK.  Also, there is now a serious situation regarding potatoes, the old backup for wheat and rice failures. and generally a widely relied upon staple for DPRK diets.The latest hot story regarding potatoes is that a couple of people have been arrested and sent to labor camps for stealing potato seeds.  Reportedly this often goes on at this time (actually

Topics:
Barkley Rosser considers the following as important:

This could be interesting, too:

Mike Norman writes Claims that mainstream economics is changing radically are far-fetched — Bill Mitchell

Robert Skidelsky writes The Lost Peace (Short Version)

John Quiggin writes Monday Message Board

Angry Bear writes Open Thread March 17 2024, January and February were rough months for inflation

Yeah, I know, the Iran situation is more in the headlines, but nobody knows anything and everybody is shooting off their mouths.  I shall comment on that one when things settle down a bit.

Instead I shall provide info less widely reported coming out of nkecon on the still-unreported-in-MSM story about the increasingly bad food situation in North Korea (DPRK). There are multiple reports.  Drought has hit the principal rice growing area in DPRK.  Also, there is now a serious situation regarding potatoes, the old backup for wheat and rice failures. and generally a widely relied upon staple for DPRK diets.

The latest hot story regarding potatoes is that a couple of people have been arrested and sent to labor camps for stealing potato seeds.  Reportedly this often goes on at this time (actually May when there is a two week period when usually most planting occurs).  Most of the time these people are not themselves using the potato seeds to plant them themselves but selling them to others.  But this year the situation was much more serious last month, and these arrests are a sign of it.

As I argued earlier, this situation is probably aggravating political conflicts within DPRK.  We have seen a weird letter from Kim Jong Un to Trump even dumping on Biden. Trump has now further disgraced himself by not only praising this letter, including specifically for its Biden remarks, but even going so far as to say after Kim's dead brother was reported to have been a CIA informant that, no, not during his presidency will we let the CIA spy on North Korea.  We shall only use DOD intel agencies to keep track of DPRK nuclear weapons programs.

I remind all readers that the fact that DPRK has nuclear weapons is because in the first few months of the second Bush presidency, Cheney and Rumsfeld and John Bolton beat out Colin Powell on Korean policy with their fantasy that we should bring about regime change in DPRK rather than continuing with the nuclear deal that had DPRK not developing nuclear weapons that was in place and more or less functioning, despite some wrinkles. After the Cheney-Rumsfeld-Bolton gang got their way, DPRK withdrew from international agreements and began building nuclear weapons, which it is still doing, with not a damn thing idiot Trump has done to slow them down.

Hopefully, readers of this can see the analogy to the Iran nuclear situation and the appallingly idiotic policies Trump is carrying out, that make the Cheney et al gang look like choir  boys.

For Anne-nominous, still no word on those DPRK folks rumored to have been killed. That nkecon says nothing about that, well, nobody knows.  But they remain disappeared.  More important is that Kim Jong Un seems to have no functioning underlings to negotiate these matters. Josh Rogin in WaPo notes that successful nuclear negotiations involve underlings from both sides doing long and hard work on necessary details, but there are no underlings on the DPRK side. This is now strictly a Trump-Kim show, but it looks like neither of them is sufficiently competent at the art of the deal to pull a serious nuclear one off, whether or not the missing negotiators in DPRK are dead or alive.

Barkley Rosser

Barkley Rosser
I remember how loud it was. I was a young Economics undergraduate, and most professors didn’t really slam points home the way Dr. Rosser did. He would bang on the table and throw things around the classroom. Not for the faint of heart, but he definitely kept my attention and made me smile. It is hard to not smile around J. Barkley Rosser, especially when he gets going on economic theory. The passion comes through and encourages you to come along with it in a truly contagious way. After meeting him, it is as if you can just tell that anybody who knows that much and has that much to say deserves your attention.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *