Another good discussion of North Korea, food aid, and donor fatigue

There are compelling arguments from defectors that suggest it’s time to cut loose, no matter how Machiavellian that may seem. The growing suspicion is that food aid inhibits the population’s ability for self-determinism and profligates the regime’s control. In other words, while we pump $200,000,000 of food aid into the country, Kim Jong-un can spend the national budget on 4-D cinemas, water parks and, you guessed it, nuclear armament (though, that, too, is unfounded hearsay—the kind of scaremongering required to get people to take notice).

The detractors of aid argue that North Korea does not suffer from a lack of food because it can’t afford to import enough, rather, that it does so due to a systematic governmental plan of expenditure that excludes food. The government needs to adjust its own budgets before aid will be invigorated. This is almost certainly correct.

Worse still, the population suffers from dual mismanagement, first from the government and second by the WFP, whose hands are tied by the latter. There isn’t compelling evidence to suggest the aid even breaks the surface of the population. Due to the lack of transparency by the North Korean government, the vast majority of the money donated, for all we know, may have been thrown into a gigantic suitcase under Kim Jong-un’s bed. [David Whelan, Vice]

Kim Jong Un’s ostentatious, sybaritic budget priorities have changed the conversation about food aid in a way that Kim Jong Il’s budget priorities should have but didn’t. Cutting aid would break Kim Jong Un’s use of the World Food Program and its supposed recipients as hostages, but it obviously won’t fill the bellies of the hungry. Only changes in Pyongyang’s policies can do that, and those policies will only change if Pyongyang is forced to change them.

If the WFP must go, it mustn’t go quietly. Nor should the world, which ought to make Kim Jong Un pay a severe price for depriving his subjects.