The food market is completely controlled and heavily subsidised: the state buys the produce from the country’s farms and then sells it

The food market is completely controlled and heavily subsidised: the state buys the produce from the country’s farms and then sells it to city residents at one-tenth of that price.The annual shortfall in cereals production is estimated at two million tons.. Urban North Koreans receive their staple foods, such as rice, through their work units and they must use food coupons. Grocery shops were filled with vegetables and frequented by local people pretending to buy.The day-to-day reality is very different. The North Korean government did its best to convince visitors that the country was stable and its population well looked after. In March, the United States sent 55,000 tons of corn on “humanitarian grounds” in the context of continuing negotiations over the North Korean nuclear programme.
North Korea’s admission of grain shortages is in sharp contrast to the stage-managed show laid on during the International Festival for Peace at the end of April, when an unprecedented 15,000 foreigners visited the normally closed country. Thailand is reported to have shipped 50,000 tons of rice to North Korea, and will deliver another shipment by the end of this month. A North Korean trade official asked Japan yesterday to lend his country rice, giving credence to reports of serious food shortages.

Li Song Rok, chairman of North Korea’s International Trade Promotion Committee, said bad weather had damaged their crop and “we would be grateful if [the rice] arrives before the rainy season in June and July”. Tokyo does not have diplomatic relations with North Korea so an officially sponsored food- aid package would be unusual. Pages and pages of BMWs fresh in from Germany, which will soon render Ladas obsolete, to jam up the rest of Moscow as hopelessly as Brest Street And further poison the planet in the name of freedom.. In Soviet times Russians were prudish, but now they say straight out what is on their minds: “Man wants woman with big tits.”But of course, the largest part of Iz Ruk V Ruki is given over to adverts for second-hand cars. Ads repeatedly end with the words “available to Russians only” or even more blatantly “no blacks” Apparently there is no law against this.

By “blacks”, Russians do not mean people of African origin but the dark-haired Caucasians, whom they dismiss as gangsters and terrorists.I like the adverts for magicians best. These are not performers who will pull rabbits out of hats; they are white magicians who will advise superstitious Russians on the most auspicious times to make important decisions, and black magicians who will, for a fee, put the evil eye on a client’s enemies.The lonely hearts columns are also fun. Half-a-million dollars.”If you are not in this league, you can always find a flat to rent in the pages of Iz Ruk V Ruki – if you are racially acceptable. Can arrange Estonian visa.” Or: “New brick-built cottage outside Moscow Four storeys All mod cons including Finnish plumbing and Jacuzzi. Because private trading was illegal in Communist times, the Soviet press never published them.But Iz Ruk V Ruki advertises absolutely everything money can buy, and there is a lot of money washing around in Russia now, although it has yet to trickle down to the masses.The property pages of the paper are astonishing “For sale Villa on the Estonian coast Multiple garage, sauna, tennis courts, guards. The newspaper, whose title means “From Hand To Hand”, is nothing but classified ads but it makes fascinating reading. Usually I like to enrage men in traffic jams bysinging nonchalantly while they strain to inch forward but this time I drove them mad by calmly flicking through the paper.Classified ads are a rich source of information about any society.

His face was streaked with tears as he tried to persuade drivers to buy Playboy, which he kept dropping in the dust.I took a copy of Iz Ruk V Ruki from him. On the pavements stood older youths, ready to take a cut of the money.One grubby boy of about eight moved me especially He was dressed in a frock and a baseball cap. Breathing in the poisonous air probably took years off my life. But the jam did give me a good vantage point from which to contemplate the Russian free market in all its vitality and ugliness.Trotting in and out among the cars, poor children were hawking newspapers and magazines to the sweaty drivers, and wrecking their young lungs. A trip on the marble-lined Metro from the Kremlin to the station would take them a mere five minutes and cost the equivalent of less than 10 pence but they would not be seen dead using public transport.
I found myself stuck in my car for an afternoon on Brest Street last week It was impossibly hot, so the window had to be open. Here the almost exclusively male drivers of Soviet- era Ladas and second-hand BMWs brought in from Germany sit for hours honking at each other while the air turns blue from their exhaust fumes. Sure enough, they got their “Death to America”, delivered with such lack of passion that some among the chanters smiled at the cameras..

The thickest of Moscow’s ever-burgeoning traffic jams is usually on Brest Street, a narrow road that runs from the city centre to the Belorussia Station. They filmed the fidgeting soldiers and listened for the moment they were waiting for, the resumption of the half-hearted “Death to America” with which they could re-establish their medium’s blind historical routine. The black market – this, at least, was America’s fault – would be broken. The new exchange rate would be kept until the end of the year. There was no doubt what has been dominating the president’s mind this week.Up on their own stage, the camera crews were growing restive; this was definitely not the reason they picked up their visas at Iranian embassies last week.