NY Times on the Great Famine of 2006

The New York Times, via the superb James Brooke, has published a lengthy and detailed report on North Korea’s growing food crisis, combined with its bizarre decision to cut off outside food aid. The regime, perhaps stung by the growing criticism and the negative reaction to its requests for “development aid” instead, took Brooke and dozens of others on a guided tour:

“All people in the D.P.R.K. are now out to give helping hands to the farmers in harvesting,” the Korean Central News Agency said of the fall harvest campaigns around this nation, formally called the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. After a decade of reliance on food aid, Kim Jong Il, the North Korean leader, had declared 2005 to be “The Year of Agriculture.”

But the trundling tractors, hard-working peasants and marching soldiers with harvest baskets on their backs could also have been staged to impress two busloads of journalists who sped along a highway, heading toward South Korea. Separated by a six-foot-high fence and blanket restrictions against interviews with farmers, the visitors had no way of getting a closer view of food supplies in this secretive society.

After mass mobilizations of workers in June to plant rice, North Korean officials now say that their overall crop is up 10 percent over last year’s yield. With memories fading of the famine that killed as much as 10 percent of North Korea’s population of 22 million in the 1990’s, according to estimates by international organizations, officials now cite this year’s bumper rice and corn crops to justify new restrictions on foreign aid and foreign aid workers. Famine death tolls range from 1 million to 2.5 million, a figure cited at a recent conference on North Korea in Washington by Andrew S. Natsios, administrator of the United States Agency for International Development and the author of the book “The Great North Korean Famine.”

Link added by me, because I really, really recommend Natsios’s book on this subject. Brooke then discusses North Korea’s sudden and potentially tragic shift in its food aid policy, which includes an order for all personnel from private aid groups to leave the country.

“Dec. 31 is the deadline for all internationals to have left,” Padraig O Ruairc, country director for Concern Worldwide, a private group based in Ireland that works on water, sanitation and midwife projects in North Korea, said by telephone from Pyongyang. Aid groups, he added, “are getting refusals for their field visits.”

“There are a lot of indications that this is serious,” he said.

The North Koreans aren’t exactly saying that the private projects must end, but the restrictions they’re imposing are severe enough that few will continue to operate.

Oversight by resident foreigners is essential for aid programs to continue, said David Hill, North Korea representative for the European Commission Humanitarian Office. Speaking from Pyongyang, he estimated that his $21 million annual budget provided most of the funds for nine of the private groups here.

“Our prime requirement is that our partners are present on the ground, permanently,” Mr. Hill said. Noting that talks are under way with North Korean officials to save the aid programs, he added, “Brussels is not going to shift on permanent residency.”

Brooke then discusses the World Food Program’s acquiescence to the new restrictions, which the WFP simultaneously and disingenuously tries to “repackage” as direct aid (to donor nations) or “development aid” (to the donee):

Until now, the agency has avoided describing its aid here as development assistance, largely out of fear of alienating its largest supporter, the United States.

Now, to maintain this flow of food deemed vital to the most vulnerable one third of North Korea’s population, United Nations officials are saying it was development aid all along. Mr. Ragan said he was now engaged in “a repackaging exercise.”

“We have been dressing up development aid as humanitarian aid,” Mr. Ragan said by telephone from Pyongyang. “There has been a reluctance by the donors to say they are doing development assistance.”

The reality is otherwise . . .

“Out of the half a million tons we bring into the country every year, 75 percent is for classical development assistance,” he said of food rations paid to workers on infrastructure projects. “Anytime you are in a situation with a chronic food problem for a number of years, the humanitarian and the developmental aspect blur.”

. . . which makes the result foreseeable enough:

In New York, Jan Egeland, the United Nations emergency relief coordinator told reporters on Sept. 23, “Abruptly halting humanitarian assistance programs at the end of the year would be potentially disastrous for the millions of people who benefit from the humanitarian assistance including food and medicines provided by the United Nations.”

His organization estimates that 7 percent of North Koreans are starving, and 37 percent are chronically malnourished. According to United Nations statistics, 40 percent of the children suffer from stunted growth, and 20 percent are underweight. The average 7-year-old boy is 7 inches shorter and 20 pounds lighter than his South Korean counterpart.

The North Koreans, after feebly declaring that harvests are up, then blame the United States for politicizing food aid, which it isn’t. It’s demanding the opportunity to monitor it to make sure that it goes to the hungry. Even with some WFP monitoring during the last famine, North Korea simply closed off vast areas of the country to food aid, which caused hundreds of thousands of dead in the Northeast in just a few months.

A private bipartisan group that is considered the leading American group on the issue, the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, recently issued a report, “Hunger and Human Rights: The Politics of Famine in North Korea,” that said “up to half of aid deliveries do not reach their intended recipients,” but instead might be diverted for sale.

And now, for the most important information in the entire report:

At the Washington conference, Mr. Natsios said continued American aid was contingent on the presence of the World Food Program staff in North Korea. “If the World Food Program leaves, we’re leaving,” he said.

The report ends by discussing South Korean aid, which is virtually unmonitored, and all the influence that it will supposedly buy. The question that Brooke doesn’t address is how much enmity it will buy from North Korea’s disfavored classes if South Korean aid only makes it possible for the regime to send the WFP monitors packing.