Good Friends: Rations Suspended in Pyongyang; Population Survives on Savings, Markets

A new Good Friends dispatch is up on the Web.  The obvious caveats apply:  it’s 100% hearsay.

Good Friends reports that  the traders who feed the northeastern city of Chongjin  are now wandering from town to town  to find food.  Many are going to Sinuiju and finding nothing; the place is in the middle of a major crackdown on markets.  Although Good  Friends does not say so explicitly,  protests in Chongjin appear to have ended, possibly with the dissenting  female traders sent to labor in factories.

The monied elites in Pyongyang are still able to get food in the surrounding towns:

Pyongyang recently decided to stop all public distribution from April till October. Some officials in Pyongyang are saying that such long stoppage of public distribution of food has never happened, even during the Arduous March. But the Pyongyang residents have some money with which they can buy foodstuffs in markets in Pyongsung, Sariwon, and Nampo, among others. And they also have some spare food, which means that no one is starving as of now. However, they are still nervous since their spare food levels are low and the food prices are skyrocketing. While the roads going to other cities are in bad condition, Pyongyang residents’ food situation will be in dire straits if the food supplies run low in other regional markets. [Good Friends]

This could  trigger a  bidding war that will  price people who live in those areas right out of the market. Things continue to look bad for next year’s harvest, too.  There are severe shortages of fertilizer and plastic sheeting, and corrupt officials are stealing much of the limited supplies and funds  before they reach the county distribution centers.  [Update: typos fixed.]

Usually, we would cope through the 6-month farming practice, farming on private plots, and trading in the markets. Our government stopped us from doing these one by one. At the end of 2005, they stopped us from doing the 6-month farming and using private plots because they said the public distribution was starting back up. Last year, they began to crack down on market activities. Also, the heaven was not on our side. We had huge floods two years in a row. There is no way anyone has huge stores of food because we haven’t had good harvest for two consecutive years. So, how are we supposed to live without food? What use is skills and willpower if we don’t have food?”

Morale sounds pretty low:

An official in Pyongyang echoed similar sentiments, saying, “No matter how much they exhort us to come up with plans to get over this crisis in food, how can we come up with food that just isn’t there? China is limiting food exports and we don’t have our own stores of food left. The Cabinet might have all the meetings they want but what could they do? The food situation was improving from 2002-2004 in the aftermath of the Arduous March, but it started going downhill again in 2005 when talks of restarting the public distribution system came up, which was a huge mistake. Our country is in serious trouble right now for sure, with all the flood damages, lack of fertilizer, ill-conceived seizures of private plots, and stoppage of non-public distribution management policy. He went on to say that there are officials who agree with him but are too afraid to speak up. “I would try to muster up courage to speak if there is any chance of change, but the situation inside is probably far worse than what they suspect from the outside,” he continued. There are rumors that famine victims will start to appear in major cities like Pyongyang, Hamheung, Chungjin, and other major cities by April. By May, we could see a mass famine.

The New York Times’s Choe Sang Hun also read the report, and although Choe’s reporting tends to be charitable toward Pyongyang and its enablers, he finds most of the fault for the crisis lies with the regime’s suppression of markets and its politically motivated belligerence toward its South Korean benefactor:

This week, North Korea, angered by South Korea’s announcement of some limits on its aid, called the South’s new president, Lee Myung-bak, an “impostor” and a “U.S. sycophant,” and declared that the North “will be able to live as well as it wishes without any help from the South.

With that pronouncement, the North effectively denied itself a chance to request South Korean food aid this year. The North had sought aid in recent years before the spring months, when food shortages are worst.

The spreading fear of hard times has already helped to drive up grain prices in North Korea by up to 70 percent over last year, said experts in Seoul and North Korean defectors in South Korea who help relatives back home through Chinese intermediaries.  [N.Y. Times, Choe Sang-Hun]

What Choe consistently leaves out of  his analysis, however, is  President Lee’s insistence that food  distribution in the North be transparent, and the North’s refusal (so far) to allow that.  But even the North Koreans are capable of making concessions when their backs are against the wall.

Good Friends adds it own view at the close of the dispatch, stating that the food situation is getting “perilously close to extreme danger,” and that the unprecedented rise of the price of corn to 900 won per kilogram is especially alarming.  It calls on governments in the North and South to abandon their “inflexible” positions and begin planning now for a response to the crisis.

It’s true that this may be the last chance to plan the kind of humanitarian intervention needed  to prevent a new famine, but famine probably can’t be prevented  at all  if the regime won’t let food be distributed fairly and evenly.  Although planning can’t really begin in earnest until we know under what conditions food can be distributed, planning should be based on the only terms that ought to be acceptable  to the donors  —  transparent, independent distribution  without conditions, and access to every last country in North Korea, including concentration camps.  For the first time in years, the elites are worried about their food supply, too, which means that if NGO’s insist on fair distribution, there’s a real chance the regime will have to yield.