The international community has been imposing sanctions against North Korea since Pyongyang’s sixth nuclear test in September last year. The strong sanctions have blocked North Korea from trading seafood products as well as its main export items, and the nation is struggling with its chronic food shortages. According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, North Korea is short of 460-thousand tons of food, which the nation should import or receive from the international community as humanitarian aid. The food shortage problem in North Korea has been an ongoing issue in the country. In 1998, a South Korean man named Kim Soon-kwon visited the North to try and resolve the issue. He is known in Korea as “Dr. Corn” for his achievements in the development of high-yield corn strains. Today, we’ll meet with Dr. Kim, director of the International Corn Foundation and chair professor at Handong Global University

I heard from the U.N. that corn was a key staple food for North Koreans, and I also heard the news that they were starving to death. I couldn’t sit idle. I thought I should do something for our brothers and sisters in the North, who were in such a difficult situation. So I returned from Africa in 1995. North Korea invited me five times, but the Kim Young-sam government in South Korea said that it would send me to North Korea only when some inter-Korean problems, including the issue about separated families, were resolved. Years later, after the inauguration of the Kim Dae-jung government in South Korea, I was allowed to visit North Korea.

Dr. Kim is a world-famous agricultural scientist who developed “super corn” in the 1970s and spread it to South Korea and Southeast Asia. At the time, the development was considered almost impossible. He visited Africa in 1979 at the request of the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture. There, he created corn varieties that could resist “striga,” which is a virulent killer weed known as “Devil’s herb,” to make great contribution to dealing with hunger. He was nominated on as many as five occasions for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He stayed in Africa for 17 years before returning home in 1995. The reason was clear. He wanted to help out starving people in North Korea.

From 1995 to 1998, North Korea was hit by a severe famine that was even worse than in Ethiopia. Countless people died of hunger and disease at the time, and a report said that three million North Koreans starved to death. But North Korean statistics show that the figure is 600-thousand.

You just heard from Ahn Chan-il, a North Korean defector and head of the World Institute for North Korea Studies. North Korea suffered from an extreme food shortage in 1995 and 1996 due to massive floods amid the already difficult economic situation as a result of the collapse of the Communist bloc. Pyongyang officially requested Dr. Kim to visit the North, but things didn’t work out due to North Korean provocations and the deadlock in relations between South and North Korea. It was not until 1998 that his North Korea visit was approved. On January 17 that year, a cold and windy day, Kim traveled to North Korea to look around corn farms in the nation and discuss inter-Korean cooperation in agriculture. He was faced with North Korea’s harsh reality. Let’s hear again from Dr. Kim.

The situation was beyond imagination. At the time, North Korea had a population of 22 million and the majority of North Koreans depended on corn as staple food. Unfortunately, floods caused poor crops, with the nation producing less than two million tons of food. In North Korea, I saw people dying every day. I saw people burying bodies beside the roads. In Wonsan, dead bodies lay in front of the station. It was just so terribly sad. Seeing the people dying in such a miserable situation, I thought I should save as many lives as possible, even sacrificing my life, and achieve unification.

Around 600-thousand people are said to have starved to death in North Korea during the so-called “Arduous March” period between 1995 and 1998. Dr. Kim witnessed North Korean people suffering from the nation’s worst-ever food shortages, and he made up his mind to help the nation resolve the food problem. He distributed a corn variety with a higher yield called Suwon-19, which he developed in 1976 when he worked at the Rural Development Administration. Dr. Kim continues to explain.

Suwon-19 was originally developed for soil in South Korea’s Gangwon Province. But it turned out that the corn hybrid also grew very well in North Korea. I was very surprised to find that. The seeds of Suwon-19 were planted five days later than those of Hwasong-1. Still, the former had a 23 percent increased yield, compared to the latter. We conducted the cultivation experiment in 78 local towns. A massive nationwide campaign was held to encourage North Koreans to see the amazing corn variety sent from South Korea.

Suwon-19 produced twice as many kernels as traditional corn varieties and resisted disease and insects as well as winds. The corn hybrid was grown on a trial basis in 80 villages in ten North Korean regions in 1998, and there was an over 20 percent increase in the grain yield, compared to the existing one. It was a very encouraging result, as corn was the second-most widely grown crop in North Korea, next to rice. A total of 1,500 collective farms in the nation grew the “super corn,” just three years after its distribution. The success led to the development of new corn varieties. Here again is Dr. Kim.

I selected 12 corn varieties among 50-thousand ones and created new corn cultivars that would be suitable for different regions in North Korea, including Haeju, Wonsan, Tongchon, Jongju, Bukchong and Sinuiju. That is, each of the super corn varieties had its own traits that would be fit for a particular ecological zone. I carried out the project in cooperation with North Korean scientists.

Inter-Korean technical cooperation, the first of its kind since the division of Korea, led to the successful development of 12 new corn varieties that would grow well in particular zones in North Korea. They are believed to have contributed to increasing the nation’s annual food production by more than one million tons. Dr. Kim visited North Korea 59 times from 1998 to 2013 to grow corn into a crop symbolizing inter-Korean peace and unification. Unfortunately, he hasn’t traveled to the North since then, due to North Korea’s repeated nuclear tests and strained inter-Korean ties. But he is still expecting that corn research between South and North Korea to bear fruit in the name of unification.

I would be eager to send 2,000 varieties of corn to North Korea next week if South-North relations improved. I have spent my own money in researching and breeding North Korean corn in China for 11 years, and I could distribute five new varieties to regions across North Korea for test cultivations. I’m confident that we can achieve unification through corn. Crossbreeds of maize from South and North Korea can create better or super corn varieties. If the two Koreas work together, they can restore their lost 70 years and also contribute to bringing about a change in the entire world. With this dream in mind, I continue to do research on North Korean corn in China.