Of Geography and Mortality: The Food Crisis Worsens, Again

All of the worst stories that hardly anyone ever hears happen in North Korea, and here is one of the best worst stories I’ve heard.  It’s  an object lesson in how  useless  good intentions  can be when bad intentions have all the spine.  In 1997, at the peak of the Great Famine, documentary filmmaker Mark Davis  accompanied a Care  aid worker  — and two North Korean minders — into the North Korean countryside.   They went there to  looking, in vain, for a way to save  dying people.  Many of the people you will see in this film were almost certainly dead a year later. 

Davis  grasped the problems of monitoring, diversion, and the  regime’s  misallocation of food aid with perfect clarity and compassion.  In 21 minutes, he explained the problem as clearly, and far more vividly, than any book on the subject.  If every aid worker involved in feeding North Korea  had seen this film when it was made, they might have  united to save a million lives.  It’s remarkable that the regime allowed it to be made at all.  What an exceptional thing  that one short film  has  such potential.  How typical that the film instead went mostly  unseen and surfaced a decade later on YouTube. 

Don’t miss this one.  Without any question, it’s the most insightful depiction of how the Great Famine happened — and why it didn’t have to — that  I’ve yet seen.

WORLD FOOD PROGRAM, UNICEF WARNINGS

Just over two years ago, I believed that North Korea was about to experience another Great Famine.   For the most part, I was wrong, and I’ve never been so glad to be wrong.  That year,  when there  seemed to be no margin of surplus in North Korea’s food supply, a significant share  of that supply — World Food Program aid — was slashed by 70% by regime diktat.  Why wasn’t famine the result?  I may have  underestimated the food stocks that  individuals and  local governments had hoarded.  I might also have overestimated the impact of the WFP’s pre-2005 aid by taking the WFP’s claims at their worth.  The WFP, whose monitoring of aid distribution has never really  approached adequacy, claimed that it was feeding 6.5 million people, but in fact, there’s no way the WFP can really be sure, either (Claudia Rosett has written  an excellent piece on what’s wrong with the WFP’s aid program).   Finally, there is the fact that  human beings don’t  starve quickly.  As Mark Davis explains, it happens gradually.  In stages.

With all that said, let me tell you what the World Food Program is saying now:

SEOUL, Feb 24, 2008 (AFP) – Nearly six million North Koreans are in chronic need of foreign food aid this year with children, nursing and expectant mothers and the poor most at risk, the World Food Programme said Sunday.  [AFP]

But is this really any different from most years’ annual WFP appeals?  It is. 

The UN agency said the nation would be short of an estimated 1.4 million tonnes of food this year, nearly a quarter of its total needs, following severe floods last August which wiped out more than 10 percent of the grain harvest. 

“Young children, pregnant and breast-feeding women and poor families in both urban and rural areas will be most at risk of hunger,” the WFP said in a statement.  “Many already struggle to feed themselves on a diet critically deficient in protein, fats and micronutrients.”  [AFP]

This year really is different.  Without an effective  nationwide  foreign aid program, it will be difficult for aid organizations to react quickly once the regime admits  the crisis.  Time lost will mean lives lost.  Since the end of the Great Famine, most people have been just getting by, eating just enough to survive.  If you strip  a nation’s  food supply to the bare minimum and then take away a quarter of  that, bad things start to happen:  kids don’t grow, fathers can’t plant rice, mothers can’t lactate, babies are stillborn, the old and sick waste away.  One thing I’ve learned since 2005 is that to a degree, the human body is its own storehouse.  But those stores have a short shelf life, and as they’re depleted, the body’s functions gradually shut down.   Now imagine watching that happen to your own kid.

The agency said malnutrition rates had fallen since the late 1990s. But it said 37 percent of young children are still chronically malnourished, and one third of mothers are malnourished and anaemic, citing a 2004 survey.  WFP monitoring shows that one third of the population never have enough to eat, half of the population sometimes don’t have enough to eat while only 10-20 percent always have enough to eat,” the agency said.

The WFP has been operating in North Korea since 1995 but was ordered to scale down its programme in 2005. It currently feeds nearly 1.2 million people at risk of malnutrition.  The WFP says it closely monitors food distribution to ensure it reaches the needy.  [AFP]

It’s difficult to parse what U.N. organizations say.  They  walk a fine line between attracting donor concern and  avoiding statements that could  offend the  regime.  UNICEF notes that North Korea continues to depend on international aid, and then notes that last year’s flooding did great damage to the country’s infrastructure as well as its food supply:

The devastation caused by the floods in 2007 has further increased the vulnerability of children despite the progress made over the last decade in areas such as reduction of severe child malnutrition. [….]   The floods directly impacted the lives of over 1 million people but many more have been indirectly affected through the destruction and serious damage of basic service infrastructure such as schools, health centres and water supply networks and, among them, young children and pregnant women tend to be the most vulnerable.

After the floods,  I said that “this time, letting the victims suffer and die isn’t an option,” which was meant to suggest that North Korea would be relatively swift, efficient, and cooperative with aid agencies in moving  to  help its non-expendable population.  UNICEF confirms this.  After the floods, according to UNICEF,  the regime’s cooperation “improved significantly,” monitoring also improved, and the regime even responded to a measles outbreak (background) effectively. Also as I predicted, the cooperation did not extend to the expendable population:

Despite these improvements, many challenges remain and, notably, the access to the populations living in the three north-west provinces of the country which remain inaccessible to international staff since the end of 2006, and where, as a result, UNICEF had to suspend its support except in the area of immunization and vitamin A supplementation.  [UNICEF]

I suspect a typo in that last sentence; I think they meant to note the lack of access to three north-eastern provinces: Ryanggang, North Hamgyeong, and South Hamgyeong. Access has always been relatively good in North and South Pyongang provinces, by contrast.

My point here is that history is repeating itself.  We can’t really confirm exactly how bad things are in North Korea now, or how bad they’ll be by May, but the well-connected NGO Good Friends passes along some terrifying reports and asks, “How many farm workers will survive this year?”  Those reports claim that food has run out in some collective farms in  North Hamgyeong  Province.  North Hamgyeong?   If you’re very astute, you’ve already realized that North Hamgyeong, though cursed with barren soil and inherently vulnerable to crop failures, was one of the only parts of the country last year’s floods did not hit.  Yet Good Friends reports that 20% of families in the area have already run out of food, and that 40% will be out of food by the end of this month. 

The farm workers who are out of food now are surviving daily by eating the leftovers they gleaned from the harvested fields. One old man confided that he is only waiting to die, saying that “I feel guilty to my family for living into my 70’s.” Other farm workers also agree that it’s more difficult to live day by day instead of dying and being done with it. They don’t think that better days are coming anytime soon. They say with a collective voice that the promise of a better life has become a sad joke, an outdated mantra from yester years. “How many farm workers will survive this year?” they ask plaintively. The female farm workers all say, “We must survive this year but we don’t know how to keep our husbands and children alive.”  [Good Friends]

It is often said that if there is to be famine in North Korea, it will appear in the Spring.  Spring is when winter stocks of food run out and people can’t pre-harvest their half-grown crops to survive.  At this time last year, many farmers were so physically weak that they couldn’t plant rice.  What I learned from Good Friends’s report is that North Koreans borrow food  from the state,  and at an interest rate fit for a serf or a sharecropper.  What a family borrows to survive in one year, it must repay at 1.7 times the amount next year.  (I should note that Good Friends’ full report  is full of fascinating detail.)

Most people expect things to get worse, the natural reaction to which is hoarding (so far,  I’ve  seen  no reports of significant increases in food prices).   Still, it seems that some areas are at the absolute  limits of their  food supplies: 

Last year, the wives did everything to put their husbands’ welfare ahead of theirs on the thought that a family cannot hold together without the head of the household and that children should not grow up without a father. However, the lack of food often took a toll of the nerves of the family members, resulting in a lot of fights with the wives often beaten by the husbands. Even this winter, it’s common to see women without even a pair of cottonfilled shoes roaming out in the barren fields looking for leftover grains to glean and carry it back to their children. Things are so bad that they can’t even eat a bowl of rice on the lunar New Year, the biggest holiday of the year.  Many women cried when they couldn’t afford to feed their families this past lunar New Year. They are only hoping that their husband’s or children’s birthdays won’t come up soon since they can’t afford to celebrate it in any way. “Even during the Arduous March we didn’t suffer across the board like this,” one woman cried.  [Good Friends]

Why are things so bad this year in  the one  place that was least affected by the floods?   Why aren’t we hearing reports like this from places like  Pyongyang, Pyongsong, or Nampo, where the flooding was most severe, but which are relatively accessible to foreign visitors?  The Washington Post suggests why:

The U.N. World Food Program said last week that about a third of North Korea’s children and mothers are malnourished, while only 10 to 20 percent of the population always has enough to eat.  The well-fed minority includes the Communist Party elite in Pyongyang, as well as the military, which is the fourth-largest in the world, with about 1.21 million men and women under arms, according to the State Department.

Food shortages could soon become much worse because of severe flooding last year that destroyed much of the rice and corn crop, the World Food Program said. The nutrition gap this year will amount to a quarter of the food needed to feed the country’s 23 million people — about 1.8 million metric tons, the agency said.  [Washington Post]

Even during the worst crop losses since the Great Famine, despite a worldwide shortage in the grain supply  this year that could even drive up food prices in South Korea, the elites in Pyongyang still eat, and the farmers in North Hamgyeong still don’t. 

If there is to be a famine, look for the following signs in the next 90 days:  slaughtering of draft animals, families selling their homes and most prized possessions, dramatic increases in the prices of corn,  uncontrolled mass migrations from stricken areas, and crackdowns on the internal “travel pass” system.