(E&A) "North Korea hopes big bunnies can shrink food shortage"

"Berlin - A German breeder things that he has the answer to North Korea's hunger problems: his giant bunnies that can grow to be as big as 23 pounds.
Karl Szmolinsky has raised the German Giants, gray rabbits the size of cocker spaniels, for 44 years at his home in Eberswalde, northeast of Berlin.
[snip]
North Korea, apparently, was interested in his rabbits as a possible solution for its hunger-stricken population of 23 million.
The secretive regime of communist leader Kim Jong II has relied on foreign food aid since natural disasters and mismanagement devastated its economy in the mid-1990's and led to a famine estimated to have killed 2 million people.
Diplomats from the North Korean Embassy in Berlin drove out to Eberswalde to see the big bunnies.
[snip]
Smolinsky sold them four females and two males to start a pilot program, and he plans to fly to Pyongyang, the capital of the communist nation, in April at their request to see how things are progressing.
Females produce two liters of eight to 14 offspring each year, so the four could produce as many as 112 rabbits in the first year alone. A single rabbit produces about 15 pounds of meat..."
(taken from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Sun. Feb. 4, 2007, p. 9a)

Seeing that I can't find the article online, I thought I'd type up the majority of it. (I can bring it to class.)

While it's nice to see that people are trying to come up with solutions, I can't help but think that this 'solution' isn't going to be as effective as North Korea hopes. 112 rabbits per year, 15 pounds per rabbit, 1680 pounds of meat -- and 23 million starving people???
I understand that over time the program would help more people, but this solution (like any other) is not the 'quick fix' that is needed.

I don't know enough about North Korea to say whether they should be farming, or what their exports are that they could sustain importing food... But there's gotta be a different solution than this... which *might* work given 5 years, maybe less depending on how the bunnies are (chemically) treated... but I just don't see this as the best possible solution to the problem.

Surely there is a quicker way to get these people the food they require... a quicker yield, a quicker time-frame. Why must North Korea import its food -- has economics trumped our empathy? (Why haven't other countries helped out -- just given them some extra food?)

((It's quite feasible, and indeed highly probable, that there are policies and politics that I'm just unaware of. Frankly, I'm idealistic enough to think that these should not matter in light of mass starvation... But, I've never had much faith in the political systems -- especially when it comes to taking care of the people... So I'll admit my bias, my ignorance, my lack of education. But I seriously don't see why politics and economics should trump morality and empathy. That's just me tho..))