The Next Food Crisis, Part 2: Will Josette Sheeran Stop the Next Great Famine?

As the reports on North Korea’s food situation continue to grow more dire, I’m no longer alone in warning that the country is again on the brink of famine (see, e.g., this, this, or this, at pages 26-28).  That’s why food policy — not nukes,  missiles, or even other human rights issues —  could soon become the most urgent issue in  how the world approaches North  Korea.  It would also be a real opportunity for the U.N. to redeem itself on North Korea, where its action so far have been an abject failure. 

At this critical time,  a change of management at the U.N. World Food Program is a welcome development,  if  for no other reason than the fact that one could hardly do worse than what we’ve had until now.   The WFP has spent the last decade meekly yielding to North Korean recalcitrance about transparency in aid distribution.  That allowed the regime to divert much of the WFP’s aid to the privileged while millions of its needest citizens went hungry, perhaps for the very deliberate purpose of making them easier to control.  The U.N.’s food policies have unintentionally aided that design.  The next head of the  WFP must be tougher, smarter, and more compassionate.  If Josette Sheeran is that person, she may be able to save  millions of  lives.

Secretary-General Kofi Annan today will nominate Josette Sheeran, a senior State Department official and former managing editor of The Washington Times, to be executive director of the World Food Program, U.N. officials said.

The five-year appointment remains subject to approval later today by the WFP executive board, which is considered a formality. Miss Sheeran is expected to take up her duties as head of the Rome-based agency, which administers nearly $3 billion in annual food aid, early next year.

….

From 1997 to 2000, Miss Sheeran was president and chief executive officer of Empower America, where she was a high-profile presence on the media, academic and fundraising circuits. She was an editor of The Washington Times from its founding in 1982 until she left as managing editor of The Times in 1997 to join Empower America.

If one of your first questions is whether Ms. Sheeran is a member of the Unification Church, the answer is that she was  until she left the church and the Times in 1997.  To me, that’s pretty much the end of the story; the Unification Church is just one of many religions (as in  all of them) to whose views I don’t personally subscribe.  But as I’ve noted before, the church has a long-standing  relationship  with  the North Korean regime,  a relationship may have helped Ms. Sheeran land an interview with Kim Il Sung in 1992.   Of course, a lot has happened since 1992:   the famine, revelations of some of the most depraved human rights abuses, nukes, broken agreements, and missiles.  Consider also that President Bush, who  recently froze millions of dollars worth of deposits from a joint North Korean-Unification Church investment, apparently used some of his dwindling supply of mojo to get Ms. Sheeran appointed.  Here is the State Department’s brochure  (!) promoting Ms. Sheeran for the job. 

[T]he appointment of Miss Sheeran, the Bush administration’s nominee, had been expected: Washington contributes about one-third of the WFP’s $2.9 billion budget and often applies pressure to ensure its nominees are successful. An American has managed the WFP for about the past 15 years.

….

Miss Sheeran will oversee a staff of 10,500 across the world, who deliver 4.2 million tons of high-energy biscuits, enriched milk and flour, and other food staples to people in need.

The United States contributes about $1 billion a year to the WFP, in cash as well as food staples and logistical support. The European Commission is generally the second largest donor, with $200 million, and Japan is third, with about $136 million in voluntary contributions.

This is likely to be the last appointment by Mr. Annan, who leaves office on Dec. 31. The United States has called on him repeatedly not to make any long-term appointments that will bind his successor, Ban Ki-moon of South Korea.

However, the administration lobbied hard for Miss Sheeran’s appointment, according to U.N. sources, who said Washington wants to keep an eye on an agency whose work is largely U.S.-funded.

There are the facts.  They don’t move my meter much, because I don’t think religion is either a qualification or a disqualifier,  but I’ve laid them out in case they might move yours.  My hope, simply stated, is that she comes from an ideological perspective that will be willing to confront this regime, the Chinese, and the South Koreans on food policy.  The WFP needs a leader who will be tough with the North Koreans, and who, if necessary, will call murder by its name.

Here is the WFP’s statement confirming Ms. Sheeran’s appointment (extra laughs:  praise from  George McGovern!).  One of her competitors for the job, Tony Banbury, was also an American with strong ties to the Clinton Administration.  Banbury was a senior WFP official during the years that it caved, caved, and caved again to North Korea’s limits on monitoring and transparency.     

Backgrounder:  WFP Operations in North Korea

Last year, shortly after the World Food Program declared that it needed enough  food donations to keep 6.5 million  North Koreans  alive, the regime announced that it was evicting most WFP staff and shutting down their operations.  Next, we heard ominous reports about the regime’s attempts to reconstitute the broken and politically discriminatory  public distribution system.  Human Rights Watch warned of a resurgent famine, and the DailyNK reported that some ration distributions had stopped.  In May, a much-reduced WFP  operation  was allowed back in to assist just 1.9 million people.  Then, in July,  floods destroyed much of North Korea’s food crop.  In October, after North Korea tested a nuclear weapon, China cut off one of the last sources for North Koreans to bring in food by  improving  its  border fences. 

When you consider each of these factors, it’s important to remember that North Korea has never really been capable of feeding itself, that its food shortfall never really  recovered since the depth of the famine, and that outside aid  has only mitigated hunger since then.  Some may disagree, and I’m thankful that  my dire predictions  of last year  haven’t fully materialized, but this could be the year that North Korea’s famine returns with a vengeance.  We cannot let Kim Jong Il starve another two million people.  Preventing that will require a concerted international response that forces North Korea to let us feed  its people.

The previous leadership of the WFP had met the North Korean food challenge, faced it squarely, and  whimpered quietly away.  It abandoned a long-standing humanitarian  Code of Conduct meant to insure fair, transparent, nondiscriminatory distribution.  It yielded on North Korea’s closure of  42 of 203 counties (page 87)  to any WFP  monitoring or distribution  at all.  In some cases, that was probably because those areas included gulags, whose inmates are among North Korea’s neediest, hungriest, most desperate people.  At the same time, South Korea and China pursued their own agendas and provided direct bilateral aid with little or no monitoring.  To the extent we can know where this food went, much of  it seems to have been distributed  in strict accordance with the “military first” policy.  If there were any doubts as to who was eating most of it,  one of North Korea’s  intrepid guerrilla cameramen resolved them when he released video  of a trainload of South Korean aid in the military’s custody.  The cameraman claims he took it  after its distribution had been verified by South Korean monitors (see this, too). 

Neither  the U.N. leadership nor the various donor nations made a public issue of North Korea’s willful deprivation of the needs of the people.  As a result of this weak and uncoordinated response, WFP aid saved far fewer lives that it could have, and many of those it saved only lived on in prolonged misery.  Those were points I raised to Ambassador Bolton when I met with him just a year ago today.   (Safe to say, Bolton’s chances of confirmation  aren’t looking too good these days, notwithstanding his extraordinary successes  on Resolutions 1695 and 1718.)