Publication: Living Green
Will North Korea's famine happen to us? | |
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LIVING GREEN - Wednesday, May 7, 2008
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Good morning,
That peak oil is coming is no longer a question. It's only
a matter of when. The global food system we are familiar
with depends crucially on cheap energy and long-distance
transportation—food consumed in the United States travels
an average of 1,400 miles. Does peak oil mean inevitable
starvation? Two countries provide a preview. Their diver-
gent stories, one of famine, one of sufficiency, stand as
a warning and a model.
Scroll down for excerpts from an article posted on
http://ww4report.com detailing how North Korea suffered
through an artificial peak oil and how their failure to
act caused a national disaster. Is this a dress rehearsal
for a global scenario?
Thanks for reading,
Your Living Green editor
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North Korea and Cuba experienced the peak-oil scenario pre-
maturely and abruptly due to the collapse of the former
Soviet bloc and the intensified trade embargo against Cuba.
The quite different outcomes are partly due to luck: the
Cuban climate allows people to survive on food rations that
would be fatal in North Korea's harsh winters. But the more
fundamental reason is policy. North Korea tried to carry
on business as usual as long as possible, while Cuba imple-
mented a proactive policy to move toward sustainable agri-
culture and self-sufficiency.
The 1990s famine in North Korea is one of the least-under-
stood disasters in recent years. It is generally attributed
to the failure of Kim Il Jung's regime. The argument is
simple: if the government controls everything, it must be
responsible for crop failure. But this ideological blame
game hides a more fundamental problem: the failure of in-
dustrial chemical farming. With the coming of peak oil, many
other countries may experience similar disasters.
North Korea developed its agriculture on the Green Revolu-
tion model, with its dependence on technology, imported
machines, petroleum, chemical fertilizers, and pesticides.
There were signs of soil compaction and degradation, but
the industrial farming model provided enough food for the
population. Then came the sudden collapse of the Soviet bloc
in 1989. Supplies of oil, farming equipment, fertilizers,
and pesticides dropped significantly, and this greatly con-
tributed to the famine that followed. As a November 1998
report from the joint UN Food and Agriculture Organization
and World Food Program observed:
The highly mechanized DPR [North] Korean agriculture faces
a serious constraint as about four-fifths of motorized farm
machinery and equipment is out of use due to obsolescence
and lack of spare parts and fuel... In fact, because of non-
availability of trucks, harvested paddy has been seen left
on the fields in piles for long periods.
North Korea failed to change in response to the crisis.
Devotion to the status quo precipitated the food shortages
that continue to this day.
Make sure to come back tomorrow to see a
different model operate under similar
circumstances with dramatically different
results.
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