Great Famine Update

While most of the papers appear to be on the bandwagon as accepting that North Korea’s harvests are up by 10% this year, I strongly question that because of a dubious chain of transmission–one that originates with the North Korean government and has been “laundered” through the highly credulous Richard Ragan of the World Food Program. If you want to see dissenting views, here is one, and here is another from a person I know to be truthful and who has just returned from North Korea’s northeast, the part of the country where food shortages present the greatest danger.

Of course, a fantastic crop means nothing if the people can’t eat any of it. Andrew Natsios pointed out that North Korea’s awful transporation system means that a good crop in the southwest is extremely difficult to transport to the northeast. With sky-high fuel prices and roads that, according to experienced journalists, are deteriorating, the transportation problem may be even worse this year. One of the things I asked my source, M, was how fuel prices have affected vehicular traffic and the use of tractors. M, as you may recall, said that there was no baseline for comparison, because both had been virtually nil before.

A new report (ht: my mom!) accepts that food production is up, and yet also reports that the availability of food is down, and that a sense of alarm is growing among international experts.

It’s harvest time in North Korea but there is no grain for sale in the markets. There are few signs of tractors in the rice fields that cover every inch of arable land in the isolated communist state. Instead, due to poverty and fuel shortages, the work is done mostly by hand, the cities quiet during spring planting and autumn harvest as the population is mobilized to help in the countryside.

The crop this year is, by all accounts, a bumper one. But two decisions in the last two months — to ban the private sale of grain and instead revive state distribution, and to curtail foreign aid — have analysts wondering whether North Korea could be leading its population toward disaster. “The bottom line is, they are many years away from food self-sufficiency. If they push the public distribution too far, they could easily be looking at another famine,” said Peter Beck, a Seoul-based analyst with the International Crisis Group.

A decade ago, North Korea was hit by a famine that killed as many as 2.5 million people, a result of a series of floods and droughts compounded by misguided economic policies. “The trains stopped running. People were short of food so they gathered grasses from the mountains,” said Choe Jong-hun, a North Korean official guiding foreign reporters, describing the period known as the Arduous March. The public distribution system collapsed and in the vacuum left by a weakened state, the starving population began its own tentative trading. “Some people had to open markets to save their lives,” Choe said, calling the move “heartbreaking.”

The article then contrasts this with the regime’s decision to stop taking outside food aid, and its self-portrayal as a land of dancing chickens and eggs.

In reality, aid workers say, in the poorer parts of the country people subsist on one or two vegetables and coarser grains like millet and sorghum, with little meat or eggs. If it works, the state distribution of grain could mean more people are better fed. Buying food in the market has become increasingly difficult for a populace faced with runaway inflation. But feeding a country of 22.5 million entirely through state channels is no easy feat, analysts say. “It’s a pretty massive undertaking to go from ground zero to full distribution,” said Richard Ragan, who heads the World Food Program’s operations in North Korea.

Moving 200,000-300,000 tonnes of cereal per month through public distribution centers requires proper storage, fuel and transport, all things in short supply in a country that faces chronic power shortages and is too poor to buy food on the international market. And while this year’s harvest may be good, the WFP, which feeds 6.5 million North Koreans, cautions that the food situation is precarious over the long term. “The DPRK is a chronically food-insecure country. It’s never going to produce enough food to feed itself without massively overhauling its agricultural system,” said Ragan.

So why is North Korea doing this?

Analysts say both the public distribution and the move to curtail foreign aid can also be seen as part of a pattern of the state reasserting its control, moves that could have repercussions beyond food. “They want more control over the local population and they’re afraid of losing that control,” said one Western diplomat. Aid from bilateral donations from countries like China and South Korea comes with far fewer demands for monitoring the secretive North sees as intrusive.

Others say the policies are the latest in a series of measures that point to a tightening of the political environment that is already among the most repressive in the world. Mobile phones were banned last year, there are new restrictions on driving what few cars there are after working hours and local phone networks have been delinked from the phone lines that connect foreign diplomats and aid workers.

How people can portray this kind of psychosis as being amenable to gentle persuasion is beyond me. Are you listening, Ambassador Gregg?