“Famine in North Korea:” An Interactive Review (2 of 3)

[Part I is here.]  

IV.  Aid

We will probably never know how many people died in North Korea’s last Great Famine, but can we prevent the next one?  This regime  seems so  indifferent to the suffering of its people — even  determined to perpetuate it — that well-meaning aid agencies have  been forced to compromise basic humanitarian norms.  Those compromises are understandable, but the standards were meant to keep food from being used as a political weapon. 

The compromises triggered what the authors call a “race to the bottom” as the regime gave access only to agencies that were pliabile and willing to overlook irregularities. (For an illustration of how a typical WFP shipment is distributed ““ and diverted ““ start on Page 102.)   The hostages to this tactic have always been those North Koreans  who really did benefit from international aid.

In some ways, those agonizing choices became much less agonizing when North Korea decided to expel the WFP in 2005, followed by the latter’s “stunning concession” — the authors’ words —  to the regime’s demand to dramatically scale back the entire program, the number of foreign staff, and their access to the recipients of the food  [238]. Thus, international food aid has lost much of its significance as a factor in North Korea’s food supply, which moots a lot of this discussion.  Today, the WFP is supposed to be targeting 1.9 million North Koreans for food aid, compared to 6.5 million in 2005. Donor governments have been so suspicious of the new, highly restricted WFP program that donations haven’t materialized, and the WFP still isn’t feeding even that smaller target group. 

And yet, contrary to my predictions, a new famine  didn’t result. Why not?  Lately, I’ve questioned my previous assumption  that  the WFP really was keeping 6.5 million North Koreans alive.  If diversion was actually higher than even Noland and Haggard’s estimates ““ roughly 30 to 50% of international food aid before 2006 [230] ““ and if the North Korean people were not sharing as much of that aid as we’d believed, then the impact of the loss of that aid would also be less than we’d have expected.

Noland adds strong support to that possibility by helping to translate and publish a phenomenal new survey of nearly 2,000 refugees by Yoonok Chang.   That survey found that  less than 2% of refugees reported  having received any international food aid at all, and only 57% were even aware that other nations were providing food aid. We’ve seen other evidence, in the form of this guerrilla camera footage, of large-scale diversion of South Korean food aid provided outside of WFP channels. Noland and Haggard point to previous examples of Japanese and WFP aid that was filmed as it was being sold in markets [119].  Then there were the cans of donated food that turned up in the North Korean submarine that ran aground on the South Korean coast in 1997 [109]. The South Korean NGO Good Friends even claims to have obtained a North Korean document allocating 30% of food aid to the military, 10% to select bureaucracies, 30% to the military-industrial complex, and the rest to regional distribution centers, which presumably exercised their own form of trickle-down favoritism [118].

Did North Korea’s domestic production rise enough to make the difference?  Almost certainly not.  The 2005 harvest was the best in years, but it was still only a  slight and temporary improvement over the harvests  during  the famine years.  The 2006 harvest was way down because of flooding.  This year’s will almost certainly be much worse.

V.  Engagement

Noland and Haggard  state,  

“It is an obligation of those who seek to engage with North Korea — as we believe we must — also to speak the truth about the conditions in which North Koreans live.” [18]  

I would support a truthful and forthright kind of  engagement with the North Korean people.  Unfortunately, the  North Korean government will not engage with those who speak the truth  about those conditions.  Speaking the truth also  requires a willingness to put up with fulminations about “human scum” and “sea[s] of fire.”  Given  the choice,  statesmen have clearly chosen engagement over truth.  It’s not so much the Rodong Sinmun that subdues them as  the  hissing from the foreign policy establishment and governments that do not share our interest in speaking those truths.  

This collective failure shouldn’t surprise  us too much.  The “international community’s” nominal leader, Ban Ki-Moon,  built his career  on ignoring this  crime and appeasing its perpetrators. His  most visible effort on North Korea has been to order the audit and phase-out of a the UNDP’s operations  there due to the exposure of massive irregularities with them.  Noland and Haggard  want the WFP and donor nations to “continue to highlight government practices that impede the delivery of food to vulnerable groups, including diversion …. [231]   That’s rather kind of them  after they’ve explained what pains the WFP took, and still takes, to avoid any criticism of the regime that might endanger their access.

In the end, Noland and Haggard can’t conclude with anything better than a slightly more idealistic version of what has never worked with Kim Jong Il:  the hope that engagement will induce Kim Jong Il to make modest and gradual reforms, but doing nothing that would actually force him to make them by threatening his power base and lifestyle.   Here, the authors’  ideas  lack  clarity, focus,  and most importantly,  originality.   Having told us the extent to which experience suggests otherwise, they  attempt to argue that sotto voce pressure from the outside could actually  sway North Korea to adhere to international humanitarian norms [232].

What if other nations completely shut off trade, aid, and remittances?  If so, the authors believe, the likelihood of regime changes rises to 40% in the first year and nearly 100% in the medium term [223], although they believe that this would come at a prohibitive cost to the North Korean people. It’s hard to dismiss their argument against such a course easily:

We applaud those with the courage to make such a sacrifice for themselves. But we are much less comfortable with the notion that the outside community should make that decision for vulnerable North Korean citizens. [230]

Yet in 2006, apparently as this argument was written [238], Kim Jong Il performed that experiment for us, and on the usual subjects.  As a result, it’s never been less clear how many needy people  international aid is reaching.   “Famine in North Korea” may exponentially expand  your factual knowledge of how the North Korean people live and die.  As with every detailed and honest analysis, it sometimes raises facts that lead in contradictory directions.  If you’re looking for solutions, however,  “Famine in North Korea” has little new to offer.  Instead, take the  facts from this otherwise extraordinary book  and apply your own thinking to them. 

VI.  Questions

*   Have you been able to show a correlation between the delivery of international food aid and food prices in North Korean markets?  How about bilateral aid from countries like South Korea and China that do little or no monitoring?  Is there any difference in the effect on market prices, and if so, what does it tell you?

*   You say that North Korea’s food problems “will not be definitively resolved until that regime is replaced by one that  [is]  more responsible to the needs of its citizenry,” [3] but you also  express doubt that the  North Korean regime  will reform [17].  I see this as a recurring contradiction in your book:  investing the only slender hope you hold in a fundamental change in the regime’s character, a change you  both seem to  doubt will ever come.  Was there some debate between the two of you over this?  Can you harmonize the apparent contradiction or do you simply  coexist with  it?

*   No one seems to be able to even agree on how many people are left in North Korea. What’s your best guess?

*   In the summer of 2005, the WFP estimated that it was providing the marginal survival ration for 6.5 million North Koreans — that is, the amount of food it added to the diets of these people was just enough make the difference between the table and the grave. How was it that North Korea could reject most of that aid without triggering  a massive new famine?

*   I wonder if Josette Sheeran, the new WFP Administrator, has read your book.  Has her office corresponded with you?

*   What can you tell us about the scale and distribution of hunger in the North Korean military forces? Do you have enough information to suggest preferential distribution between, say, the army and the navy, or between different army units?