Factoid:
As much as 10 percent of the population of North Korea may have starved to death since 1997 in the worst famine the world has seen this decade.
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Hungry North Koreans Trade Nuke Info for Potatoes
Famine-stricken North Korea has agreed to allow U.S. personnel to inspect a suspected nuclear facility in exchange for assistance with potato cultivation.
By GSReport
Start Date: 3/25/99
Famine-stricken North Korea, one of the world's most secretive nations, has agreed to allow U.S. personnel to inspect a suspected nuclear facility in exchange for assistance with potato cultivation. The unusual trade comes as North Korea is ramping up an urgent project to diversify its domestic food supply by growing potatoes for the first time. Soldiers of the North Korean army were recently dispatched, with great ceremonial fanfare, to assist with the first potato harvest.
Despite longstanding mistrust and disagreement between North Korea's hard-line communist regime and the West, the United States is the largest provider of foreign assistance to North Korea. This year, the U.S. has pledged to provide 200,000 tons of food, on top of 500,000 tons donated last year. Much of this year's donation will be aimed at supporting the "potato revolution."
Under the new arrangment, U.S. agricultural advisors will go to North Korea to assist in developing a productive potato growing program.
Famine in North Korea has reached catastrophic levels. "The food situation this year still remains very difficult," the nation's Central News Agency said recently, with characteristic understatement. Senior Washington sources have said that the famine is "a major disaster with perhaps the greatest loss of life of any humanitarian emergency this decade."
No one can be sure how many North Koreans have starved to death, but reliable estimates run as high as 2.5 million deaths in the last three years -- more than ten percent of the nation's population. Two-thirds of all children under age seven are severely malnourished.
Meanwhile, former U.S. Defense Secretary William Perry said that U.S. officials had been given access to a suspected nuclear facility similar to one that had been shut down in 1994. The underground facility could have housed a reactor and processing equipment sufficient to build nuclear bombs, but such equipment was not found there. "I hope and I believe... that if they ever intended to put nuclear facilities there, they will not do it now," Perry said.
 Excelsior, Michael Lindemann's new novel (written under the pen name Michael Paul), depicts a wholly plausible near future in which human cloning is both widespread and widely abused; terrorists have access to target-specific biological weapons; recreational space travel is commonplace; and mounting pressures of global climate change, environmental decline, population growth and civil unrest inspire radical new approaches to urban security.
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