SEOUL, South Korea — Food and power shortages remain as dire as ever in parts of North Korea outside Pyongyang, a U.S. congressman said Wednesday after a rare trip away from the capital.
The few foreigners who visit North Korea are usually not allowed to leave the showcase capital city. But U.S. Rep. Tony Hall, D-Ohio, was permitted to tour the eastern industrial town of Chongjin as well as rural areas that have been hard hit by years of bad weather and economic mismanagement.
"You need to travel outside the capital and into the countryside and you'll discover that things are very bleak and very cold," Hall said at a news conference in Seoul, the South Korean capital, a day after finishing his four-day trip to the North.
Despite a history of enmity, the United States is a major donor of food to North Korea. The North has allowed some food aid officials to travel outside the capital, including Hall, who founded the Congressional Hunger Center to study and publicize hunger issues.
Hall's comments came on the same day that U.N. aid agencies appealed for $68 million in aid to buy grain and help prevent famine in North Korea. The U.N. appeal — the sixth since chronic food shortages struck North Korea in 1995 — demonstrated that Pyongyang remains dependent on foreign aid despite its recent efforts to break out of diplomatic isolation.
The North has struggled since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Droughts, floods and tidal waves in the last five years caused famines that killed hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people and pushed North Korea's ailing economy and collective agricultural system toward collapse.
In October, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright visited Pyongyang and held reconciliation talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. She attended banquets and held talks in stately government rooms, but Hall said he saw a picture of a government that cannot provide the most basic resources for its people.
He said the main hospital in Onchon district, south of Pyongyang, gets only one to one-and-a-half hours of electricity a day and has virtually no heating. Sanitation is poor, the 88 patients get only seven ounces of food a day and there are neither antibiotics nor aspirin, Hall said.
Hall said a North Korean official told him: "It can't get any worse because we are at the rock bottom."
At his news conference, Hall displayed a coil of dry, compressed brown noodles that he said was made at an "alternative food" factory in Chongjin. The ground-up ingredients were 40 percent grain and 60 percent twigs, leaves and bark, he said.
International aid workers in North Korea have said food shortages, while still widespread, are not as severe as they were a couple of years ago. But the lack of electricity in most buildings, including medical facilities and nurseries, looms as a major problem as another harsh winter begins.
In 1994, Washington agreed to help build North Korea two nuclear reactors to meet its power needs in exchange for the North freezing its own nuclear program. Washington promised to build the first light-water reactor by 2003, but delays have plagued the project, infuriating the North Koreans.