The famine in North Korea
Witness History
BBC
4.5 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 7 July 2021
⏱️ 9 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Communist North Korea suffered a devastating famine in the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union which had been one of the country's main supporters. Hundreds of thousands of people died of starvation. Some estimates put the death toll at more than two million. Josephine Casserly has been hearing from Joseph Kim, who was a child in North Korea in the 1990s, about the struggles of his family.
Joseph has written a book about his experience called Under the Same Sky.
Photo: North Korean boys at a kindergarten in Pyongyang pose for a World Food Programme Emergency Food Assistance photographer in 1997. Their thin arms and legs, knobby knees and distended abdomens show that they are seriously malnourished. (Credit: Susan North/AFP/Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Choosing what to watch night after night the flicking through the endless |
| 0:06.8 | searching is a nightmare we want to help you on our brand new podcast off the |
| 0:11.8 | telly we share what we've been watching |
| 0:14.0 | Cladie Aide. |
| 0:16.0 | Load to games, loads of fun, loads of screaming. |
| 0:19.0 | Lovely. Off the telly with me Joanna Paige. |
| 0:21.0 | And me, Natalie Cassidy, so your evenings can be a little less |
| 0:24.9 | searching and a lot more auction listen on BBC sounds. You're listening to the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Josephine |
| 0:39.2 | Kassily. Today I'll be telling the story of the famine that devastated North Korea in the 90s. |
| 0:47.0 | We used to eat 3 minutes a day and we started eating less meals from three to two to one and |
| 0:59.0 | some days you just don't have it at all. That's Joseph Kim. He was born in North Korea in 1990 and even in his earliest childhood memories food was scarce. North Korea is and was a communist state and it had close links to the Soviet Union. |
| 1:16.0 | So when the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 90s, |
| 1:20.0 | North Korea lost one of its main trading partners, and its economy and its food supply started to suffer. |
| 1:27.0 | North Korea had a planned economy in which buying and selling food wasn't allowed. |
| 1:32.0 | Instead, each family was allocated a food ration |
| 1:35.2 | by the state and when Joseph was growing up those ration started to reduce. |
| 1:39.9 | Even though I was young it was easy to read my parents from their face expressions. |
| 1:46.3 | I mean, the room was kind of full of darkness. |
| 1:50.1 | But amid this darkness, Joseph does have happy memories of his childhood. |
| 1:55.0 | His parents were loving and kind, and when there wasn't enough food to go round, Joseph's |
| 1:59.8 | father would give some of his portion to Joseph. |
| 2:03.0 | Then in 1995, an already dire situation got worse. |
... |
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