I decided that my ignorance about North Korea was inexcusable. I'm learning a lot of fascinating things about the country thanks to the magic of the Lazyweb. United Press International:

North Korea's founding leader, Kim Il Sung, had pledged to build a "people's paradise" in which "all the people lead happy lives in tile-roofed houses with sufficient with steamy rice and meat soup." However, the North Korean climate and soil are not particularly fit for rice growing and crops were meager, leading to mass starvation since the mid-1990s. With arable fields accounting for less than 17 percent of its territory, the North can hardly produce enough grain to feed is 22 million citizens. Of this farmland, only 30 percent is rice paddies. Farming has also been frequently affected by inclement weather. Still worse, under the name of "juche farming," North Koreans cut down trees on hills to make rice paddies in the 1960s and 1970s. Due to this, however, the mountain slopes were no longer able to hold water required for farming, especially during rains North Korean agricultural experts, however, were forced to press forward "juche farming" because it was introduced by "Great Leader" Kim. Three consecutive years of floods from 1995-97 buried those hill paddies while mud from the treeless hills buried most of the richer rice paddies in the valleys and plains. North Korean defectors say it took four years to get rid of the mud from the fields. Since the "worst-ever" flood in 1995, up to 2 million people have reportedly died in the country. The acute food shortages have forced the state, led by Kim Jong Il since the 1994 death of his father, to swallow its pride of juche and seek outside food aid. Relief workers said this week North Koreans were facing new food shortages that could be as bad as 1996 and 1997, the peak of the near-famine conditions of the past 10 years. About 6.5 million North Koreans will not receive food rations in February and March, the World Food Program warned, calling for urgent international assistance to help feed the country's hungriest people.