Once Again, Kim Jong Il Starves the People; Once Again, World Doesn’t Know How to Respond

Recently, I was arguing with an influential supporter of a soft-line approach to North Korea about food aid.  Generally, we both supported the provision of food aid, and both of us acknowledged that the regime would use every means at its disposal to divert that aid to loyalists, high-ranking cadres, and the military. We agreed that Kim Jong Il doesn’t see the lives of all North Koreans as having equal value.

We diverged when it came to what U.S. policy should be in the face of such challenges.  I acknowledge that the Americans who negotiated the terms of this year’s modest aid program went in with eyes wide open and the best of intentions, but I believe that the measures we secured to prevent diversion are inadequate.  To me, nothing short of full transparency, anytime inspections, and nutritional surveys of the recipients (to actually confirm that they’ve been eating the food aid we’ve given them) is enough.  Unless we have full confidence that our aid is feeding the hungry, we should not provide any aid.

Only when the elites get hungry enough will their interests will align with those of the people in the provinces.

I do not acknowledge that Kim Jong Il has any legitimate reason whatsoever to deny humanitarian workers full access to the starving people we’re trying to feed.  A tyrant’s sovereign right to secrecy ends when he accepts, and is justifiably suspected of stealing, international aid. For example, according to this 2006 survey (pdf) of more than 1,300 North Korean refugees in China, 96% denied having ever received any international food aid.  Remarkably enough, there is even video and photographic evidence of the North Korean military caught in the act of stealing and receiving diverted food aid, and of that aid subsequently being sold in the markets.

Each of the various entities with the ability to ameliorate this unfolding catastrophe has a plan not to.

The North Korean Plan:  Squander the national treasury on everything but food.

There are plenty of illegitimate reasons for the regime’s determined secrecy.  They could include outright diversion, a discriminatory selection of recipients, or the concealment of much greater hunger among concealed populations (concentration camp prisoners, for example).  We also know that the regime has previously responded to the arrival of international food aid by cutting back on commercial purchases of food and diverting its limited funds for such priorities as “fighter jets from the Kazakh air force and centrifuges from Pakistan,” or this week’s example:

The United States has imposed sanctions on 13 companies accused of aiding the weapons programmes of North Korea, Iran or Syria, the State Department said Friday. The companies include firms based in Russia, South Korea, China, Sudan, Venezuela and the United Arab Emirates, as well as in the three targeted countries.

The United States had “credible information” that the companies made sales that could “make a material contribution to weapons of mass destruction or cruise or ballistic missile systems,” State Department spokesman Gordon Duguid said in a statement. The companies include: Russia’s Rosoboronexport; South Korea’s Yolin/Yullin Tech; Chinese firms Xinshidai Company, China Shipbuilding and Offshore International Corporation and Huazhong CNC; Venezuelan Military Industries Company; and United Arab Emirates firm R and M International FZCO. [Earth Times]

In addition to the South Korean firm, two North Korean firms were sanctioned — Korea Mining Development Corp., a/k/a KOMID, and Korea Taesong Trading Co.  KOMID was already sanctioned, and the reports don’t suggest that any funds were blocked, so this will probably have almost no practical effect.  Two other examples of things that clearly mean more to Kim Jong Il than starving North Koreans:  long-range missile development and ugly skyscraper hotels he’ll never fill.

Other recent reports also suggest that the regime continues to squeeze the people to feed its military:

The North Korean authorities recently ordered each collective farm to store food provisions in the “No. 2 Storage (rice reserve for the military for wartime emergencies)” as the first priority to support the People’s Army. Consequently, there has been concern that the remainder of the food allocated to farmers will only last three to four months this year.

An affiliate of the food policy office in a county of Pyongyang said via a Daily NK source, “The decree has been given that by the end of November when the fall harvest is completed, the No. 2 Storage will be first and foremost filled and that food be provided to the military as prescribed.

The No. 2 Storage, a wartime reserve created for emergency times to feed civilians and the army in each city and county, is gathered under the pretext of preparing for wartime emergencies and is gathered under the direction of food policy offices and collective farms in each region.

North Korea, after undergoing a serious food crisis this year, executed the order around May allowing rice reserved in the No. 2 storage to be used if it means it will prevent starvation deaths. During the drought the city and county party organizations and Administrative Committee provided food to special provision recipients and the People’s army through the No. 2 storage, but since April, in the aftermath of the drought period, the reserve has been exhausted.  [Daily NK]

This, naturally, means less for everyone else.

“Central party officials, after receiving this year’s harvest reports from the Agricultural Ministry, were told that the lower-than-expected amount of harvest would not allow them to meet the quota for military stockpiles,” Buddhist aid group Good Friends, which obtains information through contacts within North Korea, said in its newsletter today.   [Bloomberg, Heejin Koo]

Interestingly, the Daily NK quotes the regime’s Rural Management Committee as estimating this year’s annual harvest at around 5.5 million tons.  Of course, the North Korean system is notoriously bad at generating accurate statistics, but that figure would be much higher than last year’s harvest, and would align with some of the highest North Korean harvest figures in recent years, and would be much higher than WFP and FAO estimates.  I question its veracity for one important reason, which is the effect of pre-harvesting by the hungry this year.  If there’s any truth to it, it would mean that overall, North Korea has enough food to feed its own people, notwithstanding numerous reports that North Koreans continue to starve by the dozens in certain areas.

The South Korean Plan:  Deny that there is a problem.

So is there a food crisis in North Korea at all?  I’ve been convinced since the spring that there is, and the overwhelming weight of available evidence suggests that North Koreans are starving by the dozens, but not by the thousands.  Yet last week, South Korea actually said there is no food crisis.  How can that be?

Unification Ministry spokesman Kim Ho-nyeon said that North Korea’s harvest this year is not bad, citing South Korean civic officials who recently visited the country.

“We believe that the North’s food condition is not in a serious crisis situation,” Kim told reporters, adding that the weather has been good and there were no heavy rains like the ones that devastated the North last year.  [AP, Kwang-Tae Kim]

The U.N. Plan:  Exacerbate the problem with misdirected compassion.

Not so, says the U.N.:

His comments came a day after the U.N. food agency said millions of North Koreans face a food crisis and called on donor countries, including South Korea, to provide urgent food aid.

“Some areas of the northeastern provinces in the country … have become extremely vulnerable, facing a situation of a humanitarian emergency,” Jean-Pierre de Margerie, the WFP’s country director for North Korea, said Thursday at a forum.

Around 2.7 million people on North Korea’s west coast will run out of food in October, the WFP said in a report released Tuesday.

Food shortages have forced many North Koreans to go to hills to collect wild food to complement their daily rations and reduce the number of meals per day to two, de Margerie said.  [AP, Kwang-Tae Kim]

More on the U.N.’s latest bleak assessment here.  Take careful note of Margerie’s suggestion that the food situation is worst in the northeast.  Why should that be so?  This year’s shortages are blamed largely on floods that struck most of North Korea in August of 2007.  Guess which part of North Korea, though filled with North Korea’s least-favored citizens, was the furthest from those directly affected by those floods?  You guessed it:

This map, courtesy of Good Friends, shows that the flood affected the southern half of North Korea, while the provinces we’re now told are the hungriest are the provinces way up in the northeast corner — North Hamgyeong and Ryanngang, places of exile with barren soil and several of North Korea’s worst concentration camps.  That squares with the pattern I first observed in the spring, and which is also consistent with the pattern of “triage” Andrew Natsios observed during the Great Famine of the 1990’s.  Then, the regime summarily cut off the food supply to North Hamgyeong province, causing 300,000 deaths in just a few months.  That’s what the regime tends to do when things get hard:  it cuts off the supply of outside food to the relatively expendable people of the northeast.

Whether the regime has deliberately chosen to starve certain areas or not, a strong correlation simply does not exist between this year’s food crisis and its alleged causes.  Nor do the U.N.’s harvest figures square with what either the North Korean or South Korean governments seem to believe.  Finally, Marcus Noland has recently concluded that previous U.N. estimates have overstated North Korea’s annual food needs.

Consider:  what if neither the U.N. nor the South Koreans are wrong, strictly speaking?  Based on the available evidence, it’s as good a theory as any that there’s enough food for everyone … yet many people are starving anyway.  You don’t have to guess why:

[U.N. Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in North Korea Vitit] Muntarbhorn cited the “great disparity” in the access to food by the country’s elite and the rest of the population, nonexistent political participation, rigid control over the media and those professing religious beliefs, and the persecution of dissidents.  [AP, Elizabeth Lederer]

You can read a more detailed interview with Muntarbhorn here.  North Korea still won’t let him in, and I’ve yet to hear of any influential American tells the North Koreans that they should.

The U.S. Plan:  Aid and Abet

And today, we have come to the point at which North Korea asks the U.S. government to set up a special food aid program exclusively for its most favored people — its nuclear scientists — and we’re about to agree:

North Korea, in exchange for dropping its nuclear projects, is seeking foreign aid for farmers who supply food to workers at atomic facilities, a Japanese newspaper said Thursday.

The communist regime has asked the U.S. to provide help for a total of 10,000 people, including the farmers and nuclear engineers who would need to change jobs, the Yomiuri Shimbun said in its evening edition.

The newspaper, quoting unnamed sources in a dispatch from Washington, said the U.S. government has tentatively agreed to offer job assistance for the engineers, fearing they could go to work for Iran, Syria or other countries.

The chief U.S. nuclear envoy Christopher Hill has told the North Koreans that Washington was prepared to offer aid similar to packages for former Soviet nuclear engineers, the Yomiuri said.

Pyongyang has repeatedly told U.S. officials the closure of its nuclear facilities would also mean job losses for area farmers, the newspaper said.  [AFP]

Meanwhile, we all eagerly await Christopher Hill’s proposal of a special food aid program for the children of Camp 22.

Just when you thought the behavior of our State Department could not sink further beneath contempt, it does.  To accept the North Korean regime’s diversion as cost of “doing business” is to willfully help it to use food as a weapon and prolong the wholesale misery of the North Korean people.  That misery won’t end until the regime allows completely transparent distribution, or until the elites feel pain to the same extent as everyone else and decide that the regime must go.