WaPo on Hunger in North Korea: Change Comes Despite the Regime, Not Through It

The Washington Post certainly has become a better paper now that someone other than Glenn Kessler is covering North Korea.

A year after this excellent report, Blaine Harden follows up to explain how in North Korea, change comes to North Korea from the bottom up, despite the regime’s best efforts, through the desperation of starving people unwilling to accept their expendable status, rather than because the regime is receptive to reform or openness. Change is coming to North Korea, but not because we aid and empower the regime; instead, it comes because the regime’s control is too decrepit and eroded to prevent change from happening. This is a must-read, but I will give you a few quotes to get you started:

The “eating problem,” as it is often called in North Korea, has eroded Kim’s authority, damaged a decade of improved relations between the two Koreas and stunted the bodies and minds of millions of North Koreans. Teenage boys fleeing the North in the past decade are on average five inches shorter and weigh 25 pounds less than boys growing up in the South, according to measurements taken at a settlement center for defectors in South Korea.

Mental retardation caused by malnutrition will disqualify about a quarter of potential military conscripts in North Korea, according to a December report by the National Intelligence Council, a research institution that is part of the U.S. intelligence community. The report said hunger-caused intellectual disabilities among the young are likely to cripple economic growth, even if the country opens to the outside world or unites with the South.

“Baby homes, children homes and boarding schools seem to be in a dire state,” one aid worker wrote in a diary last year after touring government institutions for children in a northern province. “Access to food is limited, and children are both socially and physiologically vulnerable.”

[….]

Kim is also struggling — and by many accounts failing — to contain an outbreak of capitalism and profiteering that food shortages and food aid have helped spread. Since famine killed perhaps a million North Koreans in the mid-1990s, a sprawling, unruly and often corrupt network of private markets has replaced the government as the prime distributor of food.

“People on the outside don’t realize it, but North Korea right now is in a drastic state of change,” said Jiro Ishimaru, who edits Rimjingang, a journal of reports, photos and videos smuggled out of North Korea by anonymous eyewitnesses. [Washington Post, Blaine Harden]

Today, aid groups estimate that half the calories consumed come from private markets, which the government has repeatedly tried and failed to shut down. Eighty percent of families now depend on markets for their survival.

Four nutrition surveys conducted between 1998 and 2004 by the government, UNICEF and the World Food Program found that wasting, a symptom of severe malnutrition, was three to four times more prevalent in remote provinces than in Pyongyang. Judging from a U.N. food assessment last fall, that pattern persists. Since the 1950s, the government has classified citizens based on its assessment of their political reliability and sent those it deemed untrustworthy to remote corners of the country.

Although North Korea is often called the last bastion of Stalinism, it is better understood as a quasi-feudal police state where bloodlines dictate access to the best schools, jobs and food.

In other words, people starve in North Korea because the regime selects them for starvation. There are three main mechanisms by which this happens: first, people are allocated a lower priority in food rationing because of their background; second, entire regions may be allocated less food because those regions are disfavored (see, e.g., this graphic accompanying Harden’s report); and third, people in state institutions (orphans, detainees and prisoners, the elderly) are allocated insufficient food to survive while the state squanders the state’s assets on, say, 20 new long-range missiles in just one year.

Yet in recent years, even the soldiers themselves are taking a lower priority than the production of weapons of terror:

Service in the military was for decades a way for children from the least-favored bloodlines to escape hunger. But in recent years, food shortages have also affected low-ranking soldiers, said Kwon Tae-jin, a frequent visitor to the North and director of North Korea agriculture studies at the Seoul-based Korea Rural Economic Institute, which is funded by South Korea.

During a severe pre-harvest food shortage last summer, many soldiers received only two meals a day, were visibly malnourished and scavenged for food by stealing crops from state farms, he said. Troops in the city of Kangdong, about 18 miles east of Pyongyang, were ordered to stop training to conserve energy, according to a photographer who smuggled out photos of emaciated soldiers.

“The military was popular for kids so they wouldn’t starve,” Kwon said. “Now they feel it is better to make money in the market.”

This may turn out to be the regime’s fatal mistake.

Harden, along with the L.A. Times’s Barbara Demick, is one of the few journalists who understands how North Korea’s regime uses food as a weapon. The logical extension of this system is that the regime will let us feed only as many people as it must, in order to keep its power structure fed.