GENEVA: North Korea has a problem with human waste which is threatening the health of its children, according to a rare survey of family life in the reclusive country done by UNICEF. The UN has also praised the country's openness with the data.
"This new seriousness and improved openness about data are, in UNICEF's view, a real step forward," UNICEF's East Asia director Karin Hulshof told a news conference.
The last such survey was conducted in 2009. One piece of good news from the survey of 8,500 households was that most people had access to a toilet or latrine. The bad news was that 93 per cent of sanitation facilities were not connected to a sewage system.
The data, published on Wednesday by the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund was collected by Pyongyang's Central Bureau of Statistics last year, based on an international methodology, and lays bare some of the hardships in the lives of the population.
Instead, human excrement was used as fertiliser on fields, creating a risk of spreading intestinal worms which deprived people of valuable nutrients.
"The government is looking at this and they have started looking at how to manage human excreta in a different manner. One can also start producing other sorts of fertilisers. It's not rocket science to make fertiliser," Hulshof said.
A quarter of households had contaminated drinking water and nearly one in five North Korean children were stunted - a symptom of chronic malnutrition linked to poor educational outcomes and low productivity in adulthood.
But that was lower than a 32 per cent stunting rate recorded in 2009, Hulshof said.
SANCTIONS
The United Nations is restricted in the aid it can give to North Korea because of international sanctions, but it can help with nutrition, health, water and sanitation - as long as it has the basic data on the needs of the people, she said.
The survey also included a graph of North Korea's misshapen demographic distribution, showing the massive impact of the 1990s famine, especially on boy babies.
Last year, women aged 20-24 made up about 4 per cent of the population, while men of the same age accounted for only about 2.5 per cent - about 1 in 40 North Koreans.
Most children in North Korea were subjected to some kind of violent discipline, and 7 per cent of children aged between 5 and 11 were engaged in child labour, the data showed.
While 98 per cent of households had a television and 69 per cent had a mobile phone, only 19 per cent had a computer. Only 1 per cent nationally, and 5 per cent in the capital Pyongyang had access to North Korea's intranet, but there was no internet, Hulshof said.
Earlier this month, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un held a historic meeting in Singapore with U.S.President Donald Trump and they reaffirmed a commitment to work towards complete denuclearization of the Korean peninsula, though Washington and South Korea say sanctions on the North will remain for now.