Long-term economic devastation and dire weather led to nearly a decade of famine in the 1990s. Almost 2 million peopled died of starvation in North Korea, according to estimates by international aid workers. Floods in 1995 and 1996 destroyed over 15 percent of the country’s arable land, followed by severe droughts in 1997 and 2000 along the country’s fertile west coast further crippling the country’s agricultural production.
One in three children in North Korea are severely malnourished or “stunted,” according to the World Food Program (WFP). A harsh winter and further tightening of commercial imports and international assistance in 2011 raised new concerns for food security. Seventy percent of people receiving food rations from the North Korean government meet less than half the daily amount of calories recommended, according to WFP, and most people cannot afford to buy more.
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
