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U.N. Will Ask 2MB for Food Aid for N. Korea

The World Food Program will ask  South Korea to contribute aid for North Korea within the next 10 days.  Presumably, the aid would go through the WFP, which would represent a significant shift away from the Roh / DJ policy of giving unilateral and effectively  unmonitored aid, will full knowledge that most of it will end up in the wrong stomachs.  Lee  appears to understand  that unmonitored aid only prolongs the hunger and misery.  Left to set its own priorities, the regime will feed the elite first, the military second, and use what’s left over as a tool of control over everyone else.  That only works, of course, if they’re kept hungry.

To some extent, that principle is undercut when private organizations continue to provide aid without sufficient monitoring safeguards.  According to this report, private groups have contributed about $30 million in  food aid to North Korea this year.  The amount pales next of governmental contributions, but it’s a significant enough amount to meet the needs of plenty of  Pyongyang apparatchiks whose priorities might otherwise align with their starving countrymen. 

(I should note that the article says nothing at all about monitoring or the lack thereof.  I’m making an  inference based on what I’ve read previously, small organizations’ bargaining power, and a what may also be a restrained use of that power.   I’ll leave it to you to accept or reject that inference as you see fit.)

The WFP also estimates that North Korea’s next harvest will be just three million tons next year, which is about as bad as this year’s harvest.  If the next harvest is equal to the last one, presumably, the overall  food situation will be worse because hungry people are exhausting their reserves and  coping strategies of last resort this year.

Lee has repeatedly said that he’d give food aid if the North Koreans would simply request it, and that general principle probably won’t change despite the recent downturn in relations.  Monitoring, however, may continue to be an issue.

15 Responses

  2. No, it’s just shorthand. In fact, I think we’re starting to see Lee emerge with a stronger hand after the beef protests. Political honeymoons never last long anyway. Now that he’s gotten his way, discredited his opponents, and been handed a justification to break the far left’s lock on the state media, I expect Lee’s poll numbers to recover.

  4. As intentionally derogatory as “2MB” is, initials like “MB,” “DJ,” “YS”* and “JP” (Kim Jong Pil) were, when conceived, and for decades after birth, intentionally laudatory. They have shed some of their luster in recent years, as the practice of bashing politicians has become a favorite national pastime. But even today, appellations like “MB” are not entirely neutral. They carry a mark of distinction, namely, masculine leadership. Know of any female politician or leader with such recognizable initials? “GH” for Park Geun Hye? I think not. Still, today, to be addressed or referred to by one’s initials is a mark of distinction.

    *Kim Young Sam, whom, NK of The New York Times erroneously referred to as “Mr. Sam” during his US visit in 1995, upon meeting President Clinton in the White House, rendered the silver-tongued American speechless with the following exchange:

    Bill Clinton: “Welcome, Mr. President. How are you?”
    YS: “Fine thank you. Who are you?”
    BC: “Oh! I’m Hillary’s husband!”
    YS: “Thank you. Oh, me, too!”

  5. I never thought “2MB” was derogatory — maybe there’s a double meaning that’s lost on me — but smarter people obviously feel otherwise. I wouldn’t call myself an enthusiastic fan of Lee, but I find much in what he says to agree with, and I’m certainly not strongly opposed to him.

  6. It’s definitely intentionally derogatory. One day in Korean class a couple months ago i took a bunch of signs that I’d collected from the previous night’s protest as an ad hoc show-n-tell. Our teacher explained the “2MB” thing — I can’t remember exactly, I think it has something to do with megabytes. Ie, nowadays 2MB is nothing in terms of computer memory, so it essentially means Lee is dimwitted. If I’m not remembering correctly, someone please correct me.

  7. danb is right, which is why you saw “2MB” on those protest signs a couple of months ago.

    BTW, the MB comeback just happens to be the topic of my next KT piece. I started working on it before I saw Joshua’s comment, so no hat tips!

  9. 2MB would be two megabytes. An reasonably good-quality mp3 is likely to be bigger.

    What Vista needs is 2GB – two gigabytes.

  10. Sorry, one more note – in 1990 I had a crummy, low end MS-DOS pc that could do little more than word processing and spreadsheets. It had two megabytes of ram.

  12. “2” in Korean is a homonym of “Yi” (Lee), which make “2MB” kind of witty. A less witty variation on “Myung Bak” is “Mad Bull.” I am sure there are others.

    North Korea has no such silly appellations. “IS” (Kim Il Sung) is simply the “Sun” (Taeyang), and his son, JI, the “General.” Which makes South Korea’s “sunshine policy” kind of self-defeating in name, not to mention in substance. For the more formal name for “sun,” “Taeyang” (太陽), should be used in a national policy purportedly so meaningful but determinedly so wasteful.

    “太陽 policy,” which is how it’s referred to in Japanese, is in effect indistinguishable from “Juche” or “Songun” policy: ie, serving the Kim totalitarian family regime.

    Or perhaps the seemingly unintended tributary connotation is intentional after all.

  14. Oh, but they are ever so serious when churning out epithets like the “Sun of the Twenty-First Century” (Dear Leader) or the “Sun of the Korean Minjok” (Great Leader) or “human scum,” “world’s worst violator of human rights,” “political imbecile” (GWB).

    To call the GL-DL dynasty silly is a bit like calling the BS-PH duo vapid; ie, kinda redundant. How sad, then, that most Americans intuitively understand the latter, while they have no idea of the former.

    Reading KCNA, one can at times brush up on English vocabulary and, occasionally, even idiom usage. Real words like “lackey” and “piffle” are not, for me, at least, part of everyday lexicon.

    Or, from the KCNA piece that Joshua links above:

    1. “Pragmatism” is an anti-reunification watchword aimed at turning the north-south relations into those between merchants as it is a replica of the treacherous theory of “reciprocity.”

    2. Lee’s loudmouthed “pragmatism” is nothing but a separatist theory intended to cover up the despicable true colors of his group keen on north-south confrontation and justify its anti-reunification moves.

    If KCNA could ever hire Joshua to clean up its English, its presently silly and vapid disquisitions would overnight become pithy and eloquent. But, then again, as my college roommate used to say, if a frog had wings, it wouldn’t bump its ass a-hoppin’.

  15. But even today, appellations like “MB” are not entirely neutral. They carry a mark of distinction, namely, masculine leadership. Know of any female politician or leader with such recognizable initials? “GH” for Park Geun Hye? I think not.

    Granted I don’t follow Korean politics too closely, but off-hand I can’t name a single Korean female politician besdies Park Geun-hye. I know they exist, but none come close to her stature. A similar distinction seems to exist in the US with the controversial non-parallel use of Hillary versus Obama and rest. Hillary herself seemed to prefer being referred to by her given name, perhaps to distinguish her from her husband.

    My elderly midwestern Catholic mother, who has voted Republican consistently on the presidential ballot since Nixon, liked Hillary but wouldn’t have voted for her because she didn’t want Bill back in the White House under any circumstances. I knew McCain was in trouble when my mom said she was still undecided and seriously considering Obama.