There’s nothing little about Kim Jong-Un, the obese dictator of North Korea. Known for his immense appetite, the rotund leader left the public spotlight for nearly two months due to gout, brought on by eating too much rich food.
The problem was so bad that he now walks with a cane and wears special clothing to combat the illness.
Since he’s been back, Jong-Un has been investing vast sums of North Korean money on building nuclear weapons, creating new sea-launched missiles and upgrading the country’s pricey space program.
Yet while Kim eats lavishly and squanders what precious little funds the hermit kingdom has on toy weapons programs, his people are literally starving to death.
A U.N. official announced on Friday that record drought in North Korea will lead to huge food shortages this year, in a country already plagued by famine.
The problem is so bad that North Koreans turn to Meth, both to escape the harsh reality of daily life but also to stop eating. North Korea has the highest per capita use of Meth in the world, driven largely by a population tired of being hungry. The drug is a cheap and effective appetite suppressant.
Rainfall in 2014 was the lowest on record, at 40-60 percent below 2013 levels. This means reservoirs are at all-time lows.
“We’re extremely concerned with the impact of drought which will affect the crop this year severely. And we might be faced with another major incident of food availability or even hunger,” said Ghulam Isaczai, a U.N. official. “It is going to create a huge deficit between the needs and what is available.”
Yet the El Nino weather conditions are forecast to bring more drought this year, which means the situation in 2016 will be even worse, he warned.
“This is currently the rice-planting season. Normally they submerge the land almost a week or two in advance. But this year, I’ve seen it myself – they’re doing it in the dry, actually planting rice. So what we’re hearing right now is that they’re switching to maize and corn because that requires less water.”
A similar famine struck the country in the 1990s, killing over 1 million North Koreans.
The obese ruler’s erratic behavior further compounds the problem, not only by diverting much needed resources to expensive weapons systems but also in his treatment of aid workers.
The country has a history of jailing doctors and NGO personnel who can help in such situations meaning that aide workers are scared to go to the country for fear of ending up in jail.
70 percent of North Korea’s 24.6 million population, are already classed as “food insecure” according to the U.N.
The lack of water has also hit electricity supplies, which was at its worst in winter when hydroelectric power was restricted to reserve water for the rice-planting season. The power cuts led to many people freezing to death, a common occurrence in the country.
“What the government confirmed to me is that they’re operating at 50 percent of capacity in terms of power generation. A lot of it is now related to water,” the U.N. official added.
Yet Kim is unlikely to do anything meaningful to stop the shortages, despite some government policies aimed at addressing the issue. His penchant for exotic foods and elaborate weapons systems will doom his people, like those who lived and died under his father and grandfather, to a miserable life. And death.
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