Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by oh_sigh 477 days ago
By "a period in the nineties", you mean "since the nineties", right? So basically for the past 35 years North Korea has been heavily lagging in life expectancy.

Another way to put that is it's been 75 years since Korea split, and half that time North Korea has been much worse than south Korea.

Let's not even get into what that chart would look like if humanitarian aid wasn't shipped during those famines.

2 comments

In that chart I see one clearly identifiable famine, after which the life expectancy started rising again. Can you perhaps take a copy and mark out the other famines?

North Korea infamously refuses foreign aid, do you have a source that describes more in detail the aid you're referring to?

The World Food Programme has been operating in North Korea for years, "when possible" (read: whenever it suits the whims of the Kims).

https://www.wfp.org/countries/democratic-peoples-republic-ko...

The 1990s famine, if you want to call if that, is also sometimes described as a series of famines.

Here's more details about the aid I'm referring to.

700,000 tonnes in 1999 alone, from one country.

https://sgp.fas.org/crs/row/R40095.pdf

OK, could you mark where the other famines are in that graph?
Life expectancy in the northern portion of Korea was higher than in the southern portion up until the point the US bombed 2/3 of all buildings in the northern portion.
If you look at the graph, life expectancy didn't really diverge until the 90s, 40 years after the bombing campaign.

And, any way, the North Koreans started it.