MARK MacKINNON

HYANGSAN, NORTH KOREA — From Tuesday’s Globe and Mail Last updated on Thursday, Sep. 10, 2009 05:34PM EDT

In a country where citizens are subjected to ceaseless propaganda telling them that they live in a socialist paradise, it’s the silence that tells the other side of the story.

You can stand in the middle of some Pyongyang streets, even at rush hour, and hear only the occasional sound of an automobile engine because private cars are so rare. The quiet lingers, too, in the so-called industrial towns, their skylines dominated by smokestacks that never seem to be in use.

The silence is the sound of an economy in collapse, and nowhere is it more noticeable than in the countryside beyond the showcase capital city. Here, farmers tend their crops with hoes, shovels and their bare hands while the occasional piece of rusting farm equipment – rendered useless by a fuel shortage – sits idle amid the vast fields of rice and corn.

Despite having more arable land per capita than the United Kingdom or Belgium, North Korea is chronically, desperately short of food, and spiralling downward into its worst crisis in a decade.

The United Nations says some 8.7 million North Koreans – more than one third of the population of 23 million – are in need of food aid, marking the country’s worst food crisis since a famine in the late 1990s that by some estimates claimed the lives of three million people.

Almost three-quarters of North Korean households have reduced their food intake, and malnutrition among children under the age of 5 has risen dramatically, a result of diarrhea caused by eating food scrounged from the wild.

Like the last famine, today’s crisis is very much man-made, and one that other countries have been reluctant to help resolve for political reasons. Despite an appeal last year from the World Food Program, only $75-million (U.S.) of the needed $500-million has been received to date, and the organization expects to reach only about a quarter of those in need this year.

“We’ve been so underfunded that we’ve had to cut right back on our operations there, and indeed cut back on our staff in the country,” said WFP spokeswoman Caroline Hurford. She added that despite strict monitoring to ensure the aid gets to those who need it, it’s harder to get donor countries to support operations in North Korea than other countries in crisis.

“We hope [the funding shortfall] isn’t related to the nuclear test,” Ms. Hurford said. “We trust that the international community is focused on the real needs of a very vulnerable population. … When people are resorting to eating wild foods, it means they aren’t able to access or afford what limited food is available. They’re in desperate straits, so they’re filling their bellies as best they can.”

The crisis has been exacerbated by Pyongyang’s refusal since March to accept food aid provided by the United States, which previously had been the biggest donor to the WFP effort. Aid from South Korea – which included food and fertilizer and accounted for 5 per cent of the North’s gross domestic product – has also been suspended since last year’s election of President Lee Myung-bak, who unlike his predecessors tied such help to North Korea taking steps to dismantle its nuclear weapons program.

When the WFP launched its humanitarian appeal last year, it was to have been the largest such program in the world in terms of the number of people it helped. Now aid will get only to the most vulnerable groups: children, pregnant and nursing women, and the elderly. Since January, the program has been scaled down to just over 10 per cent of the target capacity, with the WFP slashing staff and closing three of its six offices around the country. Meanwhile, the WFP estimates that North Korea will see a shortfall of 83,000 tonnes of rice following the November harvest.

While the Pyongyang regime regularly tells its citizens that the United States – bent on breaking the world’s last truly Communist state – is to blame for the economic woes, the WFP says it has received no aid since Kim Jong-il’s regime carried out a widely condemned nuclear test, as well as a series of provocative rocket launches, earlier this year.

Building up the military at all costs is the cornerstone of Mr. Kim’s songun ideology, which emphasizes the threat posed by U.S. forces in South Korea. North Koreans, many of them deeply indoctrinated, profess to agree with that philosophy, though some are openly anxious for the country to begin developing sectors other than the armed forces.

“Now our military is strong. We are afraid of no one,” said a tour guide at one state-run museum. “But our lives are poor, as you can see, so maybe now that our military is strong, we can build up the economy.”

Analysts believe North Korea could feed itself under normal circumstances, particularly since, according to the World Bank, North Korea has just under 125 hectares of arable land per 1,000 people, compared with 95 hectares in the U.K. and 80 in Belgium and China. (The Canadian figure is 1,443 hectares per 1,000 people, a ratio surpassed only by Australia and Kazakhstan.) North Korea’s farmers, however, are crippled by the country’s isolation and the government’s top-down management of agriculture. They have faced a particularly difficult struggle since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, which meant the end of decades of nearly free fuel from Pyongyang’s former patron.

“There are no farm animals, virtually no machinery. They’re not practising anything like crop rotation,” said Paul French, author of North Korea: The Paranoid Peninsula. “You know there’s a problem when people have eaten all the livestock.”

A fertilizer shortage has also taken a toll on crop yields, and has become even more acute since South Korea stopped sending annual aid of 300,000 tonnes a year, citing concerns that the chemicals were being redirected for military purposes. North Korea’s own fertilizer output is estimated at less than 500,000 tonnes a year, about a third of the 1.5 million tonnes the country needs for use on its grain farms, according to the Unification Ministry in Seoul.

Some observers say the root of the problem is Pyongyang’s stubborn insistence on the same collective-farm model that proved a catastrophic failure in China, the Soviet Union and other socialist states.

While travelling in North Korea, Mr. French said, he noticed that private plots outside some North Korean homes were “flourishing” compared with the large collective farms. “If you give people their own land, they take care of it and make use of it as much as possible,” he said.