© The Associated PressIn this May 25, 2012 photo, a North Korean farmer sifts soil through his fingers in a dry corn field at a the Tokhae cooperative farm on the outskirts of Nampho, North Korea.
Nampho, North Korea - North Korea is mobilizing workers to irrigate farms and repair wells as officials report a serious drought that could worsen already critical food shortages.
Help, however, is unlikely to come from the United States and South Korea following Pyongyang's widely criticized rocket launch.
North Korea has had little rain since April 27, with the country's western coastal areas particularly hard hit, according to a government weather agency in Pyongyang. The dry spell threatened to damage crops, officials said, as the country enters a critical planting season and as food supplies from the last harvest dwindle.
In at least one area of South Phyongan Province where journalists from The Associated Press were allowed to visit, the sun-baked fields appeared parched and cracked, and farmers complained of extreme drought conditions. Deeply tanned men, and women in sun bonnets, worked over cabbages and corn seedlings. Farmers cupped individual seedlings as they poured water from blue buckets onto the parched red soil.
"I've been working at the farm for more than 30 years, but I have never experienced this kind of severe drought," An Song Min, a farmer at the Tokhae Cooperative Farm in the Nampho area, told the AP.
Comment: One has to wonder if the oil and gas drilling in this exact area of Italy, the gas drilling having begun late last year, has anything to do with these earthquakes...
Why Italy's Earthquake Was Weird
Then there were the recent strong earthquakes in Bulgaria and Norway. Things be rockin' and rollin'!
5.6 earthquake which jolted Bulgaria was strongest since 1858, and the aftershocks continue
USGS: Earthquake Magnitude 6.2 - Norwegian Sea