OpenForum – a blog by the Health and Human Rights community

Credit: Peter Casier/ World Food Programme

You can see it in the stunted growth of North Korean children and in the quarter of the country’s potential military conscripts that will disqualify due to “mental retardation caused by malnutrition”. Often overshadowed by the country’s nuclear program, North Korea’s food crisis is worsening. Though not as serious as the famine of the 1990s, the current food shortage is causing chronic malnutrition in millions of North Koreans, and it is largely a man-made disaster.

As a state party to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) since 1981 and a signatory to other international human rights treaties (International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women), the North Korean government has a responsibility to uphold the right to food. Instead, the actions of North Korea’s government have exacerbated the effects of the food crisis through economic policy, prevention of equitable aid distribution, and tight controls on the population, which prevent people from leaving to search for food (those who cross the border illegally into China have been arrested, detained, and even executed by North Korean authorities), according to an Amnesty International report. Despite Amnesty’s lack of direct access to North Korea, this excellent report draws on testimonies from North Koreans and reports from other sources to provide a detailed account of the political context and rights violations that pertain to the food crisis.

With North Korea’s persistent disregard for human rights, it’s hard to imagine change in the near future. But we cannot just wait for regime change. As Kay Seok points out, it is crucial for the international community to focus not only on nuclear weapons, but to exert pressure on North Korea to end human rights abuses and enact economic trade policies that allow its people to get enough to eat.

See also:

N. Korea blacks out cell phone use to stop news of worsening food crisis – Thaindian News, Oct 25, 2008

The Real Crisis in North Korea? Food – TIME, Oct 6, 2008

Hunger and Human Rights: The Politics of Famine – U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, 2005

Op-ed: Hungry for Human Rights – Washington Post, Sept 28, 2005