Starvation As State Policy

The children of North Korea, much like most of the population in fact, is forever on the verge of starvation.  This is a country that three generations back decided, through its ruling dictatorship, to become a fearsome military machine.  The entire country is at the service of its military.  Pride rests on the accomplishments of the military establishment.  Science and technology are geared toward the military end of a country's advancement into the future.

Honour is seen as parading the latest in military equipment.  The people of the country have been taught from birth onward to celebrate its accomplishments - all geared toward lionizing the military.  As goes the military so goes the fortunes and the future of North Koreans.  But the future of any country is in its children.  They are the emerging population of the country.  From their ranks will come all those who will take their place in managing the country's future.

As most countries progress from lean times to prosperity their population reflects that altered circumstance.  When people can eat more nutritious foods, and no longer have to face the certain prospects of ongoing crop failures, lack of basic nutrition, they become healthier, they produce healthier babies, those babies grow into stronger, larger children, eventually maturing to finer specimens of humanity.

Children who are malnourished will never realize their intellectual or physical maturity that will reflect a sound and efficient nutritional background.  They will mature into stunted specimens of humanity whose brain power has been truncated by a dearth of proper nutrition, just as their bodies have become nasty cartoons of what they might have been. 

And the vaunted military itself now reflects the very image of what has become of a population constantly on the verge of starvation.  The North Korean military has been forced to alter downward minimum height requirements for solders to represent the reality of what is now available in their population: 4', 9", to fill the ordinary ranks.  The country made a deliberate pact with the Devil, agreeing to divert funding for basic life necessities toward a elevated military standard.

A regional expert on North Korean values which favours weapons development over food availability and distribution, describes an "entire generation" that is "stunted physically, developmentally because of chronic malnutrition".  The UN World Food Program warns a third of children under five are malnourished.

When U.S. aid was given to the country in emergency rations it came in the form of corn-soy porridge impregnated with vegetable oil.  This nutritious form of food was prepared for a specific audience; pregnant women and children.  Its intention was to prevent the regime from taking advantage of the food to use it as nutritional supplements for soldiers, leaving nothing for malnourished children.

A practise which is common enough, and which, it is felt, is the preferred option by the regime when food aid is made available to the country; the administration diverting it from aiding those in desperate need, to ensuring that the military has sufficient food to march on.  The country that shared its nuclear expertise with North Korea made a similar choice.  Pakistan too neglected the food needs of its poor and diverted the funding that should have gone to feed people to produce nuclear technology.

The World Food Bank continually asks the UN member countries to pledge food aid to Pakistan.  The billions that the United States has paid Pakistan over the years in reflection of its purported cooperation in the global fight against terror, has gone strictly to support the military.  Pyongyang's "military first" policy has consigned its people to destitution and misery.

The $425-million it spent on its latest display of technological prowess and power, striking fear into the minds of its neighbours could have fed its population for a full year.  Instead, the rocket launch lasted all of two minutes before breaking up and falling into the sea.  Which didn't stop 50,000 of North Korea's more advantaged population from packing a stadium to cheer their new Glorious Leader In Training, Kim Jong-un.