SECTIONS Home Society SciTech Planet Cosmos SPECIAL Contents About 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.

Famine Threatens Much of Africa But Eases in N. Korea A new report from the FAO says that several nations of north and central Africa face imminent danger of famine, with millions of lives at risk. By GSReport Start Date: 8/25/99 A report released on August 9 by the Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said that 10 million people in sixteen nations of sub-Saharan Africa are threatened with famine unless emergency food supplies are forthcoming. Conditions are deteriorating across much of the African continent due to a combination of widespread civil war, drought and pest infestations. Most threatened at this time is the nation of Angola, where civil war has raged for many years. Hundreds of thousands of Angolans are already refugees, and tens of thousands more are being systematically driven from their homes by rebel military forces. Whole villages, including their crops, are destroyed in the fighting. "If this continues, in another two months we'll hear horrible stories of mass starvation," said FAO's senior economist Mwita Rukandema. Also seriously threatened is Somalia -- no stranger to famine. This year, more than half a million people are at risk of starvation mainly due to prolonged civil unrest, drought and the ravages of crop-destroying caterpillars. A combination of civil war and drought has also raised the threat of famine in Ethiopia and Eritrea. Drought has also plagued Kenya, Uganda and South Africa. Other nations on the FAO's emergency list are Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Congo, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mauritania, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Sudan and Tanzania, according to the Associated Press. Meanwhile, on a brighter note, the most drastic famine of the past decade is starting to ease in North Korea, where by some estimates up to three million people have starved to death since 1995. The collapse of its one-time ally the Soviet Union, followed by an astonishing run of natural disasters, crop failures and general bad luck, brought the nation to the brink of ruin. The normally reclusive and often belligerent government in Pyongyang was forced to appeal for massive foreign assistance, which poured in from many nations including the United States and Japan and is now credited with turning the tide. Catherine Bertini, head of the U.N. World Food Program, says that 3.5 million metric tons of food were donated to North Korea since late 1995, along with large amounts of agricultural assistance and other aid. But North Korea's woes are not over. "The base of [North Korea's] improvement has been the international aid that's come in, and if that aid stops or is lessened, it would pull the bottom out of any small recoveries that have happened so far," Bertini says. ``It is getting better... But it's very fragile. It's still very, very tentative." North Korea's example shows that international cooperation can successfully fight even the most devastating famines. But it is not clear that the international community will be willing or physically able to provide so much aid to famine-stricken nations in the future. 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. Built by Frontier on a Macintosh on 6/17/00; 12:09:13 PM. Web Comments - Produced by Larry Lowe Served 2101 times since 8/25/99.

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