North Korea Triple Whammy Food, Energy and Climate Crises

In the 1990s, North Korea was the world's canary. The famine that killed as much as 10% of the North Korean population in those years was, it turns out, a harbinger of the crisis that now grips the globe -- though few saw it that way at the time.

In the 1990s North Korea still boasted one of the most mechanized agricultures in Asia. When the Soviets and Chinese stopped subsidizing energy imports in the late 1980s, the North Koreans had a rude awakening.

Like the globe as a whole, North Korea does not have a great deal of arable land -- it can grow food on only about 14% of its territory. By the 1980s, the soil was exhausted, and agricultural production was declining. So spiking energy prices hit an economy already in crisis.

Desperate to grow more food, the North Korean government instructed farmers to cut down trees, stripping hillsides to bring more land into cultivation. Big mistake. When heavy rains hit in 1995, this dragooning of marginal lands into agricultural production only amplified the national disaster. The resulting flooding damaged more than 40% of the country's rice paddy fields.

The rigid economic structures in North Korea were unable to cope with the triple assault of bad weather, soaring energy, and declining food production. Nor did dictator Kim Jong Il's political decisions make things any better.

[AlterNet]