North Korea obtains 80 percent of its fuel and half of its food from China. That ensures that North Korea’s 1.1 million troops get just enough to eat and that civilian and military elites can live in relative comfort. The World Food Program and other organizations estimate that at least half the country’s 25 million people are underfed and bereft of medical facilities. One aspect of UN sanctions that does impact the country's rulers is a ban on luxury items. But the overall impact is muted because North Korea is not integrated into the world economy, unlike Iran, a major oil producer. Nor does North Korea produce manufactured products for export other than missiles and other armaments, which are subject to UN sanctions. Border trade with China does offer ways around the ban on weapons exports. North Korean and Chinese traders profit from this trade, likely with the full knowledge if not cooperation of authorities on both sides.
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.
