In Food Aid Talks, North Korea Reverts to Old Ways; Regime Thins Population of P’yang

A reliable source who asks not to be named e-mailed me yesterday to pass along a fly-on-the-wall description of an “expert’s meeting” in Beijing. The purpose of the meeting between U.S. and North Korean officials had been to agree on the technical details of the U.S. food aid program — exactly how the North Korean regime will and will not allow us to feed its population.

The meeting was described as “fairly downbeat” and “contentious,” with the North Korean negotiators predictably feeling that, in the wake of a public U.S. commitment to deliver 500,000 tons and with the first shipment on the way now, they have the upper hand. They are already turning recalcitrant on numbers and details, though exactly how wasn’t specified to me in detail. The North Koreans now insist that no South Korean or Japanese nationals will be allowed into North Korea to help distribute the aid, which will make the job of recruiting competent monitors that much more difficult. My source characterized negotiated improvements in the quality of the program, monitoring, and freedom of movement for the aid workers as “marginally positive.” As the regime succeeds at filling the bellies of the people who matter to it, expect the unending renegotiation of those terms to become even more contentious.

In America, the news media still haven’t really picked up on the story, although there is limited and probably increasing interest. Unfortunately, the latest example is from McClatchy correspondent Tim Johnson, who essentially echoes the official party line on the famine’s cause:

North Korea faces shortfalls of food for a variety of reasons, including dramatic flooding that ravaged the western coastal plains nine months ago, chronic fertilizer shortages, and steadily falling harvests, experts said.

“The worst of the North Korean food shortage is going to be in the next month, and the (U.S.) food aid is not going to show up in that time,” said Stephan M. Haggard , a North Korea specialist at the University of California at San Diego.

“This is really the crunch time,” Haggard said, adding that even when the first U.S. shipment of grain arrives in late June it will only serve to feed the nation for a week. [McClatchy, Tim Johnson]

But do the “experts” really attribute the food crisis to bad harvests and the stinginess of the benefactors it loves to threaten? To a limited extent, yes, but Johnson omits the most obvious and fundamental causes of the famine: the government’s mismanagement, its refusal to use its foreign exchange to import sufficient food supplies, misallocation and discriminatory distribution of food, its refusal to ask for food aid or let it be distributed fairly, and its crackdowns on trading, which had become the means of survival for so many North Koreans, who were cut out of the Public Distribution System years ago. Johnson interviewed both Marcus Noland and Stephan Haggard, who regular readers know to be frequent academic collaborators. Having read most of Noland’s writings on the subject (and many of Haggard’s) and heard him give presentations on this new food crisis, I’m reasonably confident that Noland would have cited many of those same causes when he spoke to Johnson. The fact that Johnson chose to omit them is conspicuous and troubling. Either Johnson doesn’t know the subject matter or he’s intentionally omitting key parts of it. He does, however, let this slip though when he describes the regime’s refusal to ask South Korea for aid:

“It’s their way of saying, ‘We don’t care if people die. We’re not going to make concessions,'” Haggard said.

That principle is also evident in the regime’s dealings with the United States and the U.N. World Food Program. The regime simply does not care if these people live or die, which unquestionably enhances its negotiating position. Given the choice between transparency and mass starvation, it will choose the latter every time. It makes that choice because it can. Johnson’s report notes that this first shipment could only feed all of North Korea’s hungry for a week, but the more likely result is that it will feed a much smaller number of much less hungry people for a lot longer. If we were to deprive the regime the option of opacity, however, there is reason to think that its economic and political condition is now fragile enough that they’d have to allow full and free humanitarian access.

Some of the latest evidence for that comes from Good Friends’ latest newsletter:

newsletter-number-135.pdf

Predictably, things only seem to get worse in the countryside and in provincial towns such as Sinuiju, North Pyongan Province, and Sinpo, South Hamgyeong Province (more on the worsening situation in Sinuiju, driven largely by the regime’s efforts to stamp out trade, here). The dispatch also suggests that next year’s harvest will also be terrible: there is no fertilizer, farmers are too weak to plant or work the fields, and people will be forced to eat their seeds and pre-harvest half-grown crops to survive. Thus, this year’s famine may only be the beginning of a series of cascading effects that will make this a multi-year famine, like the last one.

Good Friends also reports that the authorities are thinning down the population of Pyongyang and sending many of its residents, including many unofficial ones, to the countryside:

There are a number of people who stay with relatives, friends, or co-workers because they cannot afford a house in Pyongyang. As part of a recent census project, the municipal authorities of Pyongyang have recently made a decision to relocate people who do not own a house in Pyongyang to other parts of the country, except for those who have special reasons to stay. Pyongyang has maintained its policy of population reduction and curtailed the number of jobs in the city over the years due to the scarcity of houses, electricity, water, and heat. The people who are physically weak or are considered unable to fulfill their current jobs have been the first group to be relocated. When it comes to the time of year for reduction, the city’s overall atmosphere becomes tense. Sometimes, people named on the list of reduction confront the secretary of the municipal party or managers of companies. Sometimes one of the spouses originally comes from a home outside of Pyongyang, but the entire couple is relocated. Anyone who has been involved in a felony is also included on the list of reductions. The criteria for the reduction decisions is the principle of “Pyongyang Citizens.” anyone who is from the low part of the social status ladder or who has ever committed a crime is not eligible to be a citizen of Pyongyang. Pyongyang’s policy of population reduction, however, is seen as a selfhelp policy to address shortages food rations and necessities.

To what extent this year’s “inspection” of Pyongyang’s residents exceeds what is done most years isn’t clear from this report. One wonders how many of those people came to the capital as food refugees. Under the present circumstances, being forced to leave Pyongyang may well be a death sentence. Nor is slashing the size of the privileged class without risks for the regime.

Related: South Korean researcher Jung Gwang Min actually thinks food prices in North Korea are stabilizing. I’d say “fluctuating” is more like it, because I’m not sure the price drop Jung cites has enough statistical depth to be called a trend. Other reports I’ve seen suggest that prices have risen and fallen dramatically in just one day in some places. I’ve also read that the regime publicized the U.S. aid commitment, which drove prices down, but those prices will rise again when the people realize that the aid is too little, too late, and that it probably won’t be distributed very well.