Haggard and Noland: North Koreans Still Hungry

We’ve seen a great deal of conflicting information about the food situation inside North Korea recently, but Marcus Noland and Stephen Haggard have a new paper out that claims that the situation is still precarious for many in the provinces. They conclude that last year, the food situation was as bad as at any time since the famine, and that despite a slightly improved harvest, people are still going hungry because the food is being allocated unevenly. Read the whole thing.

There is also serious debate about the degree to which food production really has improved:

North Korea’s food supply will fall 1.17 million tons short of its 5.48-million-ton demand this year, the Unification Ministry said in a report submitted to the National Assembly’s Foreign Affairs, Trade and Unification Committee.

In December last year, the World Food Programme estimated that the North’s food shortage would reach 836,000 tons this year. “The trade volume between the North and China amounted to US$2.78 billion last year, up 41.2 percent from a year earlier,” added the ministry.

Meanwhile, last year’s inter-Korean trade reached $1.82 billion, up only 1.2 percent from 2007. [Chosun Ilbo]

Meanwhile, the regime continues to spend its scarce resources on greater priorities: an underground missile fueling facility, a new medium-range missile, and increasing the size of its special forces from 120,000 to 180,000.