How Much Food Could US$685 Million Buy?
by Richardson ~ July 14th, 2006. Filed under: DPRK Military, Economics, Hunger & Famine.According to Chung Hyung-keun, a GNP lawmaker on the National Assembly’s Intelligence Committee:
“We understand that North Korea intends to build up to 17 more Taepodong-2 missiles,” Jung said. “Some people say each Taepodong-2 costs W60 billion (US$1=W954), but the National Intelligence Service holds that per-unit cost is W25 billion. Additionally, they have about 450 US$400,000 Rodong missiles, and 400 $200,000 Scud missiles.” Chung said this was reliable information from government agencies.
Even if those figures turn out to be a bit inflated, that adds up:
How much food could three quarters of a billion dollars buy? I’ll guess about a million lives worth. H/T Barry at NK Zone.
July 14th, 2006 at 2:24 pm
benchmarking: “… $102 million feeding program, helping 1.9 million of the neediest North Koreans over the next two years”
so it is about 6M for two year. but i am not sure if that is supplementary food, or total food for the people helped in the Wapo article.
that would make $600/cap and about $1/day….that seems to make sense.
July 14th, 2006 at 2:28 pm
(correction)….so it is about 12M for two year. but i am not sure if that is supplementary food, or total food for the people helped in the Wapo article.
that would make $300/cap/2_years and about $0.5/day….that seems to make sense.
—
OTOH, the valuation is usually inflated, since it uses a lot of non-productive capacity in NK and the price index in NK is typically low. so i would probably give say the true saving may be 10%-30% of that 600M, still very large.
July 14th, 2006 at 2:30 pm
The World Food Program was feeding approximately 6.5 million North Koreans a year ago, before North Korea kicked the WFP out (it was later let back in, but with a dramatically reduced program).
At that time, the WFP described its needs this way:
So, that’s $200M for 6.5 million people — and just those who are most “at risk,” meaning you can feed a person for an entire year for just thirty bucks. Another way to look at it is that Kim Jong Il could afford to feed all of his starving people, but he’d rather have eight more Taepondongs.
It’s statistics like this that cause me to suspect that most of the 2.5 or so million people who starved in the famine were targeted for death … that it was political cleansing by famine.
Great post.
July 14th, 2006 at 2:32 pm
……then there is a twist,
if the economist’s specualtion is right, that the recent test is to demonstrate the ability of these missiles to a potential buyer (eg Iran), the missile is actually a profitable business for NK (let’s set aside the issue of proliferation for the time being).
even if you think the fund will flow into military reinvestment or Kim JI’s film collection, remember the people would be squeezed if such fund is gone.
July 14th, 2006 at 2:35 pm
Given the above, I wonder if Sun Bin really thinks the North Korean people would be the beneficiaries of North Korean missile sales.
Maybe we can do something like missiles-for-food. I’d insist on the strict condition that all of the missiles go to Taiwan.
July 14th, 2006 at 2:40 pm
No matter what the cost of the missile progams are or cost per head to feed the poor destitute DPRK population in bottom of the least “desired” is not really relevant.
Fact is midget Kim chose to stay in power no matter what at death of millions and continues to kill millions by focusing on quixotic misadventure in brinkmanship.
WORLD WOULD BE MUCH BETTER PLACE WITHOUT dear leader midget KIM though miwoe Mihwa will vehemently disagree representing mere 10% of the ROK population.
July 14th, 2006 at 2:56 pm
For some reason, the html isn’t working. Link, again:
http://www.wfp.org/english/?ModuleID=137&Key=1244
July 14th, 2006 at 3:41 pm
Slightly OT, but there’s some fun-poking of KJI here
“Seven years from now, when relations have thawed and he’s making his goodwill tour of the United States, he can spend more time in his MTV appearance discussing his Juche ideology and less time answering the tiresome “boxers or briefs?” question.”
July 14th, 2006 at 4:31 pm
I heard someone propose this for midget tyrant Kim:
Give him a small city state to call home and let him keep the swiss bank account and even his “gippumjoe” AKA pleasure squad. US/PRC/Russia/Japan/United Korea promise not to take Kim and his little empire out for couple of generations and who knows, midegt might take up the offer on it.