North Korean Harvest Output Declines Again
Reports of short harvests have been perennial in North Korea since 1993, but the worst of the famine probably ended in 2000. Some credit the end of the famine to international food aid, but North Korea’s own restrictions on international food aid have kept most of it out since late 2005. That year, I predicted — wrongly — that the result would be another famine. Although the regime’s severe cutback on food aid certainly must have caused hardship for many and starvation for some, there was no mass casualty famine in 2006 because of a development that I did not yet fully understand: the development of markets, legal and otherwise, which had quietly improved the distribution of North Korea’s meager food supply.
In his writings, Marcus Noland is fond of quoting the Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen, who has studied the anatomy of famines in history. Sen concludes that it’s not so much crop failures that cause famine, but artificial barriers that impede the distribution of food to everyone — the state’s misallocation of resources, restrictions on the market, disincentives to produce or distribute food, or other oppressive regulations.
Working from that basis, the Great Confiscation’s disruption of North Korea’s nascent market-based food distribution system is the greatest risk factor for plunging North Korea back into famine this year. This year, Noland is worried about not just decreased supply, but about impediments to distribution. On the one hand, since Noland expressed those worries, a wave of discontent and unrest may have shaken the regime’s determination to shut down the markets that most people depend on to survive (we’ll see). On the other hand, another bad harvest certainly can’t help matters:
North Korea’s food shortage is expected to further worsen this year, as the communist state’s grain output in 2009 is believed to have fallen from the previous year, a government official in Seoul said Wednesday.
The North is estimated to have produced 4.1 million tons of grain last year, a drop of about 200,000 tons compared to 2008, the Unification Ministry official said on condition of anonymity. The amount falls about 1.3 million tons short of what the impoverished country needs this year to feed its 24 million people, the official said. The North produced 4.3 million tons in 2008. [Yonhap]
But when you compare those figures to those of previous years, this year’s harvest isn’t substantially worse than that of 2007, a year in which North Korea experienced severe flooding, or the years before that. The regime and its apologists are fond of blaming North Korea’s food problems on U.S. sanctions and natural disasters, but in fact, the U.S. has always traditionally been the largest donor to the World Food program’s aid efforts in North Korea, it is the regime itself that rejects American food aid, U.N. sanctions specifically exempt humanitarian aid, and cereal grain production in North Korea has hovered near the 4 million ton level for the last several years regardless of weather conditions in the North. If famine were really a function of natural disasters, why doesn’t the same weather ever cause famine in South Korea? The obvious answer is that the North Korean regime is unaccountable to its people and disinterested in their needs.
A bad harvest will likely drive food prices up to a point where some won’t be able to afford to pay them. Still, I’ll speculate that a large new famine is unlikely this year because the North Korean people are finally able to do what the law of comparative advantage dictates that their rulers should have been doing all along — importing food. Thus, the single most hopeful part of North Korea’s food situation this year is the rise of food smuggling on a large scale. Food smuggling may wrench the food supply from the regime’s hands once and for all and do more to address hunger in North Korea than anything the World Food Program has been allowed to do yet.
Amartya Sen witnessed the Great Bengal Famine of 1933 (although as a rich kid, he looked rather than starved, I believe.) The Famine Code of the Imperial British Administration had been superseded by local dyarchy in Bengal in 1926, so the prior paternalistic mechanism for famine relief — public works, price-fixed supply, market price regulation and food kitchens — was not operative. That is the system which has completely failed in the DPRK.
Your thoughts that the black market can supply the DPRK’s dearth is, I regret, unlikely to be correct.
Assume 1.3 million tons of “grain” short, and each smuggler’s truck can carry 1.5 tons. That’s about a million trucks, or 3,000 trucks each and every night — and then some form of distribution system southwards. (Ten thousand gallons of fuel at a minimum each day, or 36.5 million in a year, in a controlled State where petroleum is in short supply — not likely.) Food stays local– so there won’t be any trickle along of smuggled food into the central and south of the DPRK. The British Famine Code relied heavily on transportation of food from a food-rich area in surplus to a starved one, by railroad — and by migration of the starving outward: there is no surplus to distribute when the country is as small as the DPRK with famine everywhere. Smuggling by railroad is presently a crime punishable by imprisonment or death — as is migration, internal or external.
Just before the Great Confiscation, there were reports of mass purchases of rice by the DPRK in the Chinese border region — but they stopped abruptly. This confirmed what we already knew: rice is short. Even Little Kim says so. But rice only goes to the rich in any event. We are seeing reports of “starving down” — rice eaters eating corn, corn eaters eating porridge, porridge eaters eating used corn cobs. The two basic food staples are in desperately short supply. People, whole families, are indeed already starving to death.
Further anecdotes are all dire. First there were reports that cabbage was in extremely short supply for the year’s prospective pickling. That is another food staple gone missing. Good Friends has just reported on a military cabinet meeting that decided to plunder the civilian food stocks for military consumption, which is a very bad sign indeed. (Personally, I think it is the worst report of all, since the People’s Army will not plunder the people unless it is itself desperate.) Then there is the report that factory food “reserves” were required to be declared and returned to source– which now suggests there are serious accounting problems with those reserves. Since we have blithely assumed a significant part of prior food aid went into military stocks — and it now seems the military doesn’t have any, and the factories may have already sold theirs in the black market, it is likely that the DPRK has no food reserves of any significance.
We urbanites forget that winter is bad — but Spring is worse for food supply. Eating the Spring shoots means starvation in Summer, and no harvest in Fall. The situation in North Korea is going to get worse and worse until the end of May, with myriad deaths.
Let’s hope one of them is Little Kim’s in an Army revolt.
Thanks for this, Joshua. I had put news of the worries about impending food crises in my Daily Kor news roundup, but you always paint such a comprehensive picture of these things. It’s greatly appreciated.