By Kim Jong-chan
Political Editor
This year marks the 60th anniversary of the outbreak of the Korean War.
Since the end of the fratricidal war in 1953, South Korea has become the first country in the world to become an aid donor having been a recipient, while North Korea still faces an economic plight that leaves many of its 23 million people impoverished.
It took only about a half century for South Korea, now the world's 15th largest economy, to become a donor from the ashes of the three-year war. Since entering the new millennium, it has been repaying what it owes to the world.
Back in the 1960s, South Korea was a very poor place. When I attended primary and middle schools in Incheon at that time, many of my friends didn't carry a lunch box and skipped meals.
Sometimes, their colleagues offered to share their lunch box. Sometimes, they were given a piece of bread made of corn provided by the United States under an aid program for poor countries. Some didn't wear stockings in the winter.
The situation in North Korea at that time is presumed to be almost the same as it was in South Korea.
But the North Korean economy has since made little progress, causing ceaseless defections by North Koreans to South Korea, mostly fleeing to China and then flying to Seoul via Southeast Asian countries.
Faced with deepening economic trouble, the reclusive state recently came out with a determination to become a "strong and prosperous nation" by 2012, the birth centennial of Kim Il-sung, its founder and father of incumbent leader Kim Jong-il.
Braving the cold spell, tens of thousands of people reportedly held a rally in Pyongyang a day after the New Year's Day under the slogan of let's build a thriving socialist nation.
The North Korans set the goal of increasing the production of daily necessities, such as grain and livestock, to improve the people's standard of living, by developing light industry and agriculture.
On a separate occasion, the "Dear Leader," Kim Jong-il, was reported to have acknowledged that life is hard in the divided northern half.
According to the Rodong Shinmun, the North Korean Communists Party's organ, he lamented that his regime had failed to fulfill the teachings left by his father, who wanted to give boiled rice meal that wasn't mixed with barley or other grains and beef soup to his people who were to be dressed in silk clothes and live in houses with a tiled instead of thatched roof.
Decades ago, South Koreans only ate beef soup and parents bought clothes and footwear for their children at a nearby traditional open-air market during the lunar New Year holiday and Chuseok, Korean Thanksgiving.
Although 16 years have passed since the death of North Korean founder Kim Il-sung, his dream of feeding people well has yet to come true.