The Great Famine of 2006: USAID Weighs In

It’s the best news yet: the United States, via USAID Administrator Andrew Natsios, will have no part of North Korea’s plan to cut off food and and demand fungible, unmonitorable “development aid.” The Chosun Ilbo is reporting on Natsios and Marcus Noland’s speeches at the Woodrow Wilson Center, which I was forced to miss Monday. There are two stories, the first of which I graf here:

Andrew Natsios told a symposium hosted by the private U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea that since Washington’s food aid to the North goes through the UN World Food Program (WFP), it would have to stop if WFP staff leave the country as Pyongyang has demanded. Natsios said development aid to the North, which it asked for instead, was not allowed by law and needed fresh parliamentary approval. He added development aid required even stricter monitoring than food relief.

Natsios warned direct, effectively unmonitored food aid from South Korea and China often failed to reach those who need it most and could thus increase the number of North Korean refugees.

The other story reports:

North Korea’s intention to bring an end to food aid provided under a decade-old World Food Program project has prompted a mixed reaction. Some analysts accept the move as part of Pyongyang’s effort to ease its dependency on foreign aid, but others believe the plan could lead to severe consequences for hundreds of thousands of hungry North Koreans.

Addressing a symposium on North Korea food and human rights issues, Andrew Natsios, head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, called North Korea’s decision a mistake. Insisting that malnutrition remains a serious threat to children in the country, he warned that the United States would refrain from shipping any form of humanitarian aid to the North if the WFP is not present to monitor its distribution.

Such critics claim surveillance over the allocation of relief packages is vital because Pyongyang reportedly abuses such aid while slashing food imports and using funds elsewhere, including on military spending. Recent reports by the U.S. Committee for Human Rights show as much as 30-percent of the food donations did not reach the targeted recipients.

Relief workers add unconditional shipments of assistance from South Korea and China, which come with little or no monitoring, are aggravating the situation, with the number of refugees poised to surge as more vulnerable North Koreans are denied their basic necessities.

It was especially gratifying to see Natsios echo a theory I’ve harped on here repeatedly: how can you trust a nation to disarm when it won’t even allow outside monitoring of food aid or other human rights conditions? It’s also good to see the growing criticism of South Korean and Chinese aid policies, because ending that aid is our only chance for a truly multilateral approach with effective monitoring. If the North Koreans, deprived of Chinese and South Korean aid, can’t feed their elite and military officers, they’ll be forced to allow monitoring.

On the same day, Marcus Noland and Stephen Haggard add their voices through the pages of the Washington Post, calling for more attention to North Korea’s “chronic food emergency.” Note that Noland’s death toll estimates from the first Great Famine are between 600,000 and 1 million, making them the lowest of all credible estimates. They then dismantle “apologist” explanations for the famine, laying the blame where it must plausibly lie:

In the mid-’90s, North Korea was battered by severe weather, including floods. But the country’s agricultural decline had begun well before those events. Rather than purchasing food on the world market or seeking multilateral assistance, the regime dithered. The government blocked humanitarian aid to the hardest-hit parts of the country and curtailed commercial imports of food as assistance was ramped up. Pyongyang in essence used humanitarian aid as balance-of-payments support, enabling dubious military white elephants such as the purchase of fighter jets from the Kazakh air force and centrifuges from Pakistan.

Grain production today remains below its 1990 level. With North Korea into the second decade of the food emergency, it is implausible to blame natural disasters. Failed economic policies and a misguided emphasis on food self-sufficiency remain problems, but underneath these proximate causes is a more fundamental political fact: the absence of human, civil and political rights. With no channels for redress, the large urban non-elite — accounting for roughly 40 percent of the population — faces a chronic food emergency.

They then address the “roadblocks” North Korea has put in the way of fair food distribution:

The primary conduit of the relief effort has been the U.N. World Food Program (WFP). The WFP still cannot monitor shipments from port to recipient. It still is not permitted to use Korean-speaking staffers (although the North Koreans now allow them to take language lessons), and aid workers are restricted in their movements. Roughly 50 workers — all the North Koreans will accept — are responsible for overseeing the distribution of food to roughly 6 million vulnerable individuals in a country the size of Louisiana.

Our estimates suggest that up to half of aid deliveries do not reach their intended recipients. They are diverted to the less-deserving or siphoned off into emerging markets.

Noland and Haggard then attack both the “starve them out” approach and South Korea’s almost-no-strings-attached aid:

But in the short term, the international community faces an ethical dilemma. It is tempting to walk away in hopes that the intensification of misery will contribute to regime change. But such a stance woefully underestimates the staying power of this dictatorship, and it assumes that others will not step in to fill the gap.

Yet, if the world is going to continue to provide aid, we should be clear-eyed about the terms on which it is provided. Two bilateral donors, China and South Korea, supply large amounts of aid that is essentially unconditional and outside the WFP ambit. This undercuts the agency’s negotiating leverage with the North Korean government.

Noland and Haggard then discuss the North Korean plan to cut off food aid, which I’ve already discussed here extensively, and close with thisL

But the ultimate guarantee of food security will come only when the North Koreans achieve the human, civil and political rights necessary to hold their government accountable.

Monitored food distribution will be an enormous victory for liberal values in Korea–first, because it will feed the hungry; second, because it will show North Koreans the world’s compassion; third, because it will break down the regime-stabilizing force of food inequality; fourth, because people who aren’t starving have the time andenergy to consider the causes of their misery.