It’s been at least a week since we’ve had a post on tourism, so we must be overdue. We’ve got golf, juche study halls, study tours, radical chic. There’s so much activity on that front that you’d think Wonsan was Miami Beach. Now from the good folks at Koryo Tours, we’ve got the heavy metal [...]
December 17, 2011
Heavy Metal Thunder by Marcus Noland
December 6, 2011
The food situation in North Korea by Marcus Noland
On 25 November, the FAO/WFP released a special report on the food situation in North Korea that concluded that despite an improvement in the fall harvest relative to the previous year, the North continues to face an “uncovered deficit” and that the population faces another year of “prolonged food deprivation.” In other words, the new [...]
November 5, 2011
Gender, Continued by Marcus Noland
At dinner with some State Department and embassy staff a few years back in Seoul, one of the State Department folks confidently asserted that three-quarters of the refugees leaving North Korea were women. “How could you know?” I asked. The diplomat frowned and pointed to the statistics on refugees entering South Korea. But the number entering [...]
November 4, 2011
Slave to the Blog: “Where to start?” edition by Marcus Noland
It’s been so long since I wrote one of these, and have such a backlog of material, I don’t even know where to start. Well, let’s start with some important stuff. The North Korean penal system plays a significant role in Witness to Transformation and is an important ongoing concern of this blog. In his [...]
September 4, 2011
Tightening Sanctions? by Marcus Noland
Numerous recent stories highlight North Korea’s continued entanglement of with various sanctions regimes around the world. First, Korean-American businessman Park Woo-il, aka Steve Park, above left, best known for importing North Korean soju and copping a plea after being arrested for lying to the FBI, announced that he had signed an MOU with the North Korean government [...]