Business of Life

When rice is a luxury

The first rule of the Business of Life is to stay alive. We are now learning from the first North Korean defectors who arrived in Los Angles how difficult that can be.

Greeted by members of a church coalition that pressed for their safe passage, they tell of famine, enslavement, torture and repression.

One refugee
recalled his astonishment upon seeing the abundance of food even in the rural areas just across the river from North Korea. Dogs were being given rice porridge to eat, he recalls, "big bowls of it." Rice is a luxury in North Korea, he said, eaten only on one's birthday and New Year's.