More Grim News on N. Korea’s Food Situation
New reports are predicting that things are looking bleak for North Korea’s food situation this winter.
Millions of North Koreans are at risk of starvation this winter as humanitarian aid levels drop amid an international furore over the country’s nuclear bomb test.
Aid agencies say much of the population is already surviving on basic rations and fear any further drop in food supplies could lead to a repeat of the 1990s famine that killed as many as two million people.
There’s also more from the DailyNK, here, reporting that food prices have not dipped and people are stocking up, even though it’s the middle of the harvest season. Some of this appears to be alarmism over the nuclear tests and the sanctions that followed, although the sanctions resolution, 1718, has an exemption for humanitarian aid.
The alarmist forecasts I was making this time last year don’t appear to have fully panned out … thankfully. Yet the current prognosis is more pessimistic than last year’s, because of severe flood damage to this year’s domestic production, on top of North Korea’s rejection of WFP aid in all but one county. I’m saddened to have to agree with Vitit Muntarbhorn that linkage between nukes and food aid is misguided (Muntarbhorn may the only U.N. official who speaks about North Korea with any credibility). I oppose the kind of unmonitored aid that South Korea gives and Kim Jong Il steals, but giving carefully monitored food aid saves lives and does little to prop up a regime that probably doesn’t care if its people starve or not. Kim has been quoted as saying that only 30% of his population would need to survive to reconstruct “a victorious society.”
The North Korean people are victims of this regime. We should be doing everything we can to help, empower, and befriend them. Doing so would undermine the regime’s xenophobic propaganda, which is probably why Kim Jong Il threw out the World Food Program last year. But feeding the hungry will require concerted international pressure: severe restrictions on trade and transactions that force the regime to accept monitored food aid. That, in turn, will require the kind of concerted international action that we saw with the nuclear issue. Rather than simply cutting off aid, as the South Koreans have recently done, nations ought to be making generous pledges through the WFP, but attaching strict conditions for monitoring and distribution that rigorously follow this long-standing Code of Conduct. We should also be pressuring the regime to accept that aid by broadcasting the substance of those pledges to the North Korean people.
Finally, if all else fails, we should be prepared to put pressure on China to allow feeding stations to be set up on its border with North Korea.
Plenty of my fellow hard-liners hope that a famine will end the Kim Jong Il regime. They are wrong. First, starving people don’t have the energy to rebel. Second, those most likely to starve are the least likely to support the regime. Third, most of those who are going hungry are in fairly isolated, non-strategic areas (the Northeast is usually hit the hardest). Fourth, the regime doesn’t care if they starve. That’s why the regime doesn’t want our food aid, and why we should be making its delivery and distribution one of our top priorities.