As Rations Run Out, Downsized WFP Operation Returns to N. Korea

Updated 5/13; scroll down

Until North Korea kicked out the U.N.’s World Food Program last December, the WFP was feeding 6.5 million out of 18-22 million North Koreans. If that alone isn’t enough to suggest that the North Korean people need the aid that the WFP was providing, reports of reduced rations and even warnings of a new famine should be.

The problem with feeding North Koreans isn’t a lack of food or donors, it’s North Korea’s refusal to allow monitoring, to ease donor concerns that the regime’s minions divert the aid away from the hungry and underprivileged. Effective monitoring is at the core of an international code of conduct on food aid, and U.S. law prevents this country from donating food to North Korea without it.

During the fall of 2005, after the North Koreans announced the termination of WFP operations, the WFP abandoned its modest gains in monitoring food aid to North Korea. It ultimately went begging for vaguely defined “development aid” instead, with the North Korean government doing its own distribution. The United States, previously the largest donor of food aid to North Korea, refused to play along.

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Now that North Korea is even having trouble feeding people in Pyongyang, the repository of its privileged class, it has agreed to allow the return of a much-reduced WFP operation — one that will feed a fraction of the number of North Koreans as previous years’ programs:

The World Food Program Director for Asia, Tony Banbury, says he signed a new agreement with North Korea on Wednesday, during a brief visit to Pyongyang.

“The World Food Program will be staying in the D.P.R.K.,” he said. “We will continue a food aid program there, assisting approximately 1.9 million very needy, food-insecure families.”

In fact, the WFP doesn’t even claim to know just how bad things have become in North Korea since December, but they sound ominous:

We don’t know what’s been happening since December, in these intervening months. We hear anecdotal reports, but we don’t have firsthand evidence. In fact, that’s one of the reasons why it’s so important for WFP to start this operation again and get out into the field to try and do a better assessment of what is happening,” said Banbury. “If people are not getting their rations, and if those rations are their primary source of food, then they’re obviously going to be facing some real difficulties. It’s our expectation that that’s probably happening in some cases.”

It’s probably a safe bet that South Korea will provide whatever is asked, no strings attached. It’s almost as safe a bet that the WFP will attach very few of its own, which explains why the U.S. has said “no,” at least until there’s an effective monitoring plan in place. Recently, the two countries had a bitter public argument about food aid policy, so a coordinated international response seems unlikely. The day before Human Rights Watch issued its dire new report on the sudden decline in food rations, UniFiction Minister Lee Jong Seok appeared to have claimed that South Korea had single-handedly ended hunger in the North.

I can only hope that some of this food will end up with those who need it. What I fear is that North Korea will allow in just enough aid so that the famine can be managed according to its political interests.

There is no human rights issue more important as pressuring this regime to avert famine — not Kaesong, not refugees, not even concentration camps or infanticide. We have seen the potential for famine to inflict millions of horrible deaths in a short time. It’s no use liberating mass graves. The agonizing truth, however, is that unless the world makes a firm and concerted response that demands large-scale, carefully monitored feeding, the Pyongyang apparatchiks will continue to sustain the core classes and let everyone else starve. They’ll have to be forced to spend their assets on caring for their people instead of squandering everything on grandiose projects and weapons.

These days, of course, the regime’s finances appear to have been disrupted significantly, but money isn’t the issue. We can get the money.

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Update 5/13: The BBC has a fairly good report, which mostly adds to what you can read above.

The Washington Post, on the other hand, does a characteristically weak effort, the kind to which we’ve grown accustomed in its reporting on North Korea. The problem with its latest is that it downplays the dramatic decline in the number of those fed, WFP access to the provinces, and WFP staffers who can make sure the food is going to those who need it. In the great famine of the 1990’s, the northeastern provinces were the hardest hit. Will monitors go there? The WFP’s Banbury claims that ten staffers will be enough to make sure that the 1.9 million beneficiaries get the food. Banbury does explain now, and I’m very skeptical.
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