U.S. Food Aid to North Korea: Two Steps Back, One Step Forward

For those of you who do not know him, Marcus Noland of the Peterson Institute for International Economics is  a leading expert and author  on the North Korean economy and  food crisis.  Noland writes in to  report that he has learned some details of the U.S. government’s negotiations with the North Koreans on food aid.  The  negotiations have resulted in an agreement (for now) on food aid to the North, something I personally support for overriding humanitarian reasons notwithstanding my distaste for the regime, and for the idea of sustaining it. 

The key caveat to my support is that the humanitarian purpose must be served, and because past aid to North Korea has been so replete with secrecy, opacity, and diversion, more transparency and better monitoring are a sine qua non to saving the lives of North Koreans  rather than  empowering and fattening their oppressors.  Most of  what follows  is my paraphrasing of Noland’s comments, although his answers in the closing Q&A section are verbatim.

Noland offers OFK readers a clearer — but still  not clear — idea of what is agreed and what isn’t. The total U.S. commitment is for 500,000 tons of food aid.  Of this, the first installment of 50,000 tons is en route now.  The rest of that “commitment,” however, will depend on our assessment of North Korea’s needs.  What role the World Food Program will play here isn’t entirely clear.  The monitoring arrangements are disappointing,  but I suppose  they could have been even  worse. We’ve negotiated 65 monitors into North Korea, but that number includes staff from private NGO’s. This makes the number less than comparable to conditions in 2005, when the World Food Program had 47 or 48 monitors in North Korea.

We did extract a few concessions from the North Koreans, although I emphasize that North Korean concessions are like sandcastles at low tide:

* The re-opening of regional sub-offices.  This begs the question of which regions will get the aid.  The answer to that question may determine whether this will end up saving lives or merely bailing out the regime that perpetuates it.

* A complete list of recipient institutions. But will the monitors be able to conduct on-going nutritional surveys of the recipients, so that we can determine who’s fattening up and who isn’t?  The answer is probably not.

* Korean speakers will be eligible to be monitors, which is a first. The North Koreans had never previously permitted this.

*  I didn’t even have the heart to ask if prisoners in the concentration camps will get any of this food.  But from what Noland says about the limited nature of the program, it’s a sure thing that the prisoners will continue to starve and die without interruption.

And what of the all-important issue of monitoring? Will the monitors be able to conduct on-going nutritional surveys of the recipients, so that we can determine who’s fattening up and who isn’t? It’s not clear. Noland reports that there “more direct access to final recipients than in the past,” but not formal household surveys like the WFP used to do.

There will be “some kind of random inspection regime,” although that leaves much to be defined to us. Let’s hope it’s well defined to the North Koreans, or it will only be the springboard to the next negotiation.

It does not appear that there will be any novel methods of monitoring, such as electronic tagging of grain sacks or special donor-isued ration cards.

Noland betrays some ambivalence about this; overall, he calls it a “a marginal improvement over the status quo ante mid-2005,” but without the improvements that the WFP was seeking when the North Koreans abruptly threw them out. My assessment is that I still have no assessment until I get answers to some questions that Marcus Noland partially answers here:

Q:  Will the aid be distributed through the regime’s public distribution system?

MN: My impression is that some will be and some won’t be. Some of the NGOs have operated food-for-work programs in the past and have indicated that they expect to do this again.

Q:  Will this be a U.S. or a U.N. operation?

NM: The WFP Asia bureau is seriously stretched by the situation in Burma, and is working hard to handle two major operations. My impression is that the official channel, up to 400,000MT [metric tons] will be via the WFP. The remainder is via the US NGOs, but in the past to a significant extent they have piggybacked on the WFP system (i.e. FALU). So it is sort of a mixed bag.

Q:  What regions of the country will receive aid?  As you have noted, North Korea ‘s infrastructure is so bad that most of the aid will probably be consumed in the same province where it is landed. The arrival of aid in Nampo may not do much to avert famine in Wonsan, Hamheung, or Chongjin, but it will be a boon to the brahmin castes in Pyongyang.

MN:  This is the point of the assessment. The USG position as I understand it is something like “we believe that the DPRK has serious trouble in a general sense, and are willing to provide the initial 50,000MT tranche concurrent to the assessment. But an assessment is needed to determine the scale of distress, its social and geographical particulars, and the subsequent program will be designed and scaled on the basis of the assessment.

Q:  Will the monitors and distributors be U.S. government or WFP personnel?

MN:  Don’t know. And remember, 50 experienced aid workers willing to live in the DPRK can’t just be conjured out of the air. My guess is that they will have more trouble recruiting workers than finding food.

Q:  What form will the aid take? Rice? Corn? Barley? Omega watches? 

MN:  Not rice.  My impression is largely corn, flour, possibly protein biscuits; I know at least one NGO maintains factories which could be used to turn flour into protein biscuits and noodles.

Q:  What about the nutritional surveys to keep track of who is fattening up and who isn’t?

MN:  My impression is that formal nutritional surveys such as those periodically conducted by the DPRK in partnership with the UN agencies are not part of the assessment and not part of the monitoring program, though presumably if this program is extended into 2009 (as I expect that it will be) that the donors will ask for this.

Q:  With regard to monitoring, do you have any idea what the North Koreans have really agreed to with any specificity? Haven’t the North Koreans’ previous verbal commitments to the WFP proven as ephemeral as anything else the North Koreans say on any given day?

MN:  My impression is that the USG and WFP people are going in with their eyes open. The USG people understand that implementation is critical, and if this is a fiasco political support in the Congress could evaporate. Using Korean speakers ought to constrain really outrageous attempts at manipulation and subterfuge (i.e taking people to the same location twice and telling them it is a different place). But how random can a random inspection under these conditions? They seem to be aiming for an arrangement in which the foreign workers get more access to local neighborhoods, local dignitaries etc., hoping that more local contact combined with Korean speakers not so reliant on their minders will generate a deeper understanding of what is really going on, and constrain things from completely running off the rails.

Many thanks to Marcus Noland for that information, and we’ll just have to watch the situation unfold.