CANCELLED: North Korea: Health and Nutritional Status of the Population

This event has been CANCELLED. Despite a precarious economy, the end of systematic provision of government food to the population and a decline in assistance from international organizations after 2001, the health and nutritional status of the population of the DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea or North Korea) showed positive trends such that national levels of malnutrition are now better on average than for Asia as a whole and the incidence of vaccine preventable diseases and malaria have been reduced.

In fact, the major killer in North Korea is from non-communicable disease including cancer and cardio-vascular disease, commonly understood as the diseases of wealthy countries.

This presentation charts changes in the nutritional and health status of the population in aggregate, national terms with some disaggregation of the data by gender and age. Indications of poverty and ill-health among the population remain worrying, especially the rise in TB cases (although there has been a sharp fall in mortality rates from TB) and the persistently high rates of maternal and infant mortality. Nevertheless, in 2015, post-famine DPRK is far from the outlier state, in nutritional and health terms, that is commonly presented.

Professor Hazel Smith is Visiting POSCO Fellow at the East-West Center and the director of the International Institute of Korean Studies UCLAN (IKSU).

Professor Smith’s publications include North Korea: Markets and Military Rule (Cambridge University Press, March 2015); Reframing North Korean Human Rights, Critical Asian Studies, December 2013/March 2014; Reconstituting Korean Security (2007); Hungry for Peace: International Security, Humanitarian Assistance and Social Change in the DPRK (2005); and North Korea in the New World Order (1996).

Professor Smith received her PhD in international relations from the London School of Economics in 1993 has held prestigious competitive fellowships at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (2012/2013), the East-West Center, Honolulu (2008 and 2015), Kyushu University, (2010), the United States Institute of Peace (2001/2002) and held a Fulbright at Stanford University (1994/1995).

Professor Smith regularly broadcasts for the global media on North Korea, where she lived and worked for the international humanitarian organizations for two years and from where she earned a (still valid!) North Korean driving license.

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East-West Center, Mānoa Campus

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(808) 944-7439, NakachiC@EastWestCenter.org

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