How Many North Koreans Was the World Program Really Feeding?

Update:   Paul Eckert of Reuters did a very fine interview with Marcus Noland. 

“It could well be that a nuclear deal that resulted in greater amounts of aid would actually allow the North Korean government to intensify activities that are essentially reestablishing economic and political control over the population,” he said.

….

“When things look better … the North Korean government tries to pull back on this process of marketization and reform,” Noland said.

“One of the saddest things is that as food aid began arriving in North Korea, the regime systematically cut the amount of food it bought on commercial terms,” he said.

This suggests that without meaningful enforcement of the arms and “luxury goods” embargoes in UNSCR 1718, food aid will become just another source of liquidity for a regime that  has become  very accomplished at the  careful calibration and exploitation  of  hunger.

And if you haven’t already done so, have a look at  Anna Fifield’s  Financial Times article, via Richardson.  There are two quotes in that piece that I’d like to add:

During one visit to Pyongyang, I was having dinner with some North Korean officials when one noticed I was not eating the beef laid out in front of us at the garishly decorated foreign currency restaurant. Learning that I was a vegetarian, he responded with a laugh: “You’d fit right in here – thre’s never any meat around.”

I wonder if Ms. Fifield realizes what will happen to that official now.  Not that I’m especially sympathetic in this case ….  Noland is under no illusions about the  importance of accountability and monitoring when we do give food aid.

“An entire cohort of children was consigned to a myriad of physical and mental impairments associated with chronic childhood malnutrition,” the authors write. “The state’s culpability in this vast misery elevates the North Korean famine to a crime against humanity.”

The authors do not think this was deliberate, although I haven’t gotten to the part of the book where they explain this.  They don’t think the North Korean regime can be starved out of existence by denying it food aid, either, and I agree:   historically, people who are struggling just to live never  rebel.   I think starving the regime itself of funds is another matter, but we now seem determined to surrender that leverage  (< must-read).  Our  policy should be to support and ally ourselves with North Korea's have-nots and undermine its rulers.  We have never made  a serious  effort to do that.

Original Post:   After North Korea effectively expelled the World Food Program in December 2005, I  was alarmist about the potential for a new famine.  Because the WFP had said that it was feeding 6.5 million out of approximately  22 million North Koreans, I expected the sudden loss of that source  to cause a severe shock.  In my defense, so did plenty of others, with  Gordon Flake being one exception.  Then came the floods of last summer, which reportedly wiped out many crops, and a crackdown on the markets on which so many North Koreans had come to depend.  The International Crisis Group called this a “perfect storm.” 

There is no honor in being right  about something like this, and at least so far, the new  famine I had predicted  hasn’t happened.  What is happening looks more like a continuation of the constant, almost calibrated condition of marginal survival and perpetual proximity to disaster:

North Korea’s food reserves have almost dried up, leaving some people starving and aggravating malnutrition across the impoverished nation, a South Korean aid agency warned Thursday.

Good Friends, which focuses on assistance to the North, said up to 70 percent of food stored by city residents has been used up due to a poor harvest last year and insufficent foreign food aid.

“There are no concerns about a famine like that in the mid-1990s but the chronic food shortage has been aggravating malnutrition,” Noh Ok-Jae, secretary-general of the Seoul-based agency, told AFP.

The report adds that  Kim Jong Il has supposedly released military food stocks to civilian use, a fact the reporters obviously have no way of confirming, but which fits with  other things we  know.  The Daily NK recently presented, in meticulous detail, food price data from  in  several cities in the  Northeast of North Korea indicating slight but significant decreases in the price of rice (still beyond the financial reach  of the poor, who  live on corn).  The northeastern provinces of Hamgyeong Puk-Do, Hamgyeong Nam-Do, and Ryanggang are generally the country’s hungriest areas, food is generally the most scarce in late winter and spring, when stocks are depleted but new crops haven’t  grown yet. 

I speculated about the causes and significance of the price drop, wondering if the regime were shipping more food to that region to help pacify it.  That would, of course, come at the expense of other areas.  That might explain another data anomaly — reports that food is less available in Pyongyang.  Another explanation could be the terrible condition of  North Korea’s roads, rails, and ports.  There are often regional differences in food supply because it’s not easy to ship food from one part of the country to another.

When the  data don’t fit  the model, it’s time to reconsider the model.  If  one-third of all North  Koreans had  in fact  depended on the  aid the World Food Program shipped each year to raise their food supply to the “marginal substence” level, and that supply food  were suddenly cut off, and famine did not ensue, then either  North Korea, needed less food than we had thought, had  found a new source of food, or the WFP aid wasn’t feeding as many people as we had thought.  The grimmest possibility is that the famine killed enough people to significantly depress North Korea’s needs, well below the WFP’s 2005 estimates.  Yet we also  know that North Korea is growing  significantly less  food than it did in 2005.   Did North Korea increase its  commerial food imports since late 2005?  I don’t know,  but I know who does.  I’m currently reading Marcus Noland and Stephen Haggard’s “Famine in North Korea,” (thanks to their publisher for the free copy), and hope to have an interview with the authors in April.  Maybe we can get some insight from them. 

On the other hand, we do know a few facts about the distribution of that aid.  We know that even in 2005,  WFP  monitoring was woefully inadequate, and that even the best estimates of the amount of the aid diverted (Noland & Haggard’s) suggested that it could be less than 30%, or perhaps more than 50%.  We also have video of the sort of direct, military-use diversion of South Korean aid, supposedly monitored in this case,  that Noland and Haggard say is more the exception than the rule.  We know that large areas of North Korea were completely closed off to foreign aid monitors and therefore not given any aid  (note that Camp 22 is marked as an “access” area, but international monitors obviously haven’t been allowed anywhere near there).  

Finally,  96% of North Koreans in China claim that they never received any international food aid (scroll down to December 2006).  None.  Even conceding that this is a skewed sample, to hear 2,000 respondents say that is simply staggering. 

In other words, it’s entirely plausible that the WFP really wasn’t feeding all that  many of North Korea’s most vulnerable people after all.  Perhaps diversion was higher than expert estimates, meaning we should question the humanitarian imperative behind the entire WFP aid program to North Korea.

Some anju links:

*   Richard Halloran says that the Yongbyon reactor may be a falling-down wreck anyway:

Informants who have been in North Korea or have access to intelligence reports say the walls of the plant are crumbling, machinery is rusting, and maintenance of the electric power plant, roads, and warehouses that sustain the plant has been neglected. North Korea’s impoverished economy just cannot support that operation.

Moreover, its technology is fifty years old and obsolete. It was acquired, possibly by Russians spies, by the Soviet Union from the British in the 1950’s, then passed to North Korea in the 1980’s. The North Koreans are anxious to replace it with something more modern and are expected to demand that later.

*   More Gullible Travels:   If South Korea can’t bring Kim Jong Il to Seoul, it may try to sent Kim Dae Jung back to Pyongyang.