Hunger and Anger in North Korea

It’s not news to readers of this site, but North Koreans’ views about their overlords are a bit more complex than the invincible one-hearted unity of Arirang pixels:

Public discontent is simmering in North Korea after the hardline communist regime imposed tighter restrictions on market trading in an attempt to reassert its control over the state, observers say. [….]

The latest crackdown began after elections on March 8 for a new parliament, according to Good Friends, a Seoul-based research group with extensive contacts in the North. Officials ordered markets to open for only five hours a day from 1:00pm and to sell only certain farm products excluding rice, the group said in its latest newsletter.

“Curbs are now tighter than several months ago,” said Lee Seung-Yong, director of Good Friends. More frequent confiscations and fines have been reported at designated markets and at places used by pedlars across the country, he said. “So far this year no organised group protests have been reported but people are raising their voices in private,” Lee told AFP.

“Complaints are stronger than before and widespread across the country.” In April, officials in cities along the border with China used broadcasting trucks to warn the public that dealing in contraband items would be punished as a felony, Good Friends said, adding that public resentment is growing. The curbs have led to a sharp drop in the number of traders but illegal clandestine trading is still widespread, Good Friends said.

It quoted trader Jung Pil-Rye as saying she displays farm products at the front of her stall and deals in banned items secretly. However, “once caught, everything is confiscated,” Jung said. [AFP, via Good Friends]

North Korea’s response to the loss of control, aside from reconstituting a state distribution system that creaks under the weight of massive corruption and discrimination, is to announce yet more unattainable, and unattained, food production goals.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il has called for a “decisive turning-point” this year in ending the country’s long-running food shortage, state media said Monday. The ruling communist party’s daily Rodong Sinmun described solving the problem as the nation’s most pressing task.

In comments marking the start of the rice-planting season, Kim demanded an all-out campaign this year “to bring about a renovation in cereal production and to make a decisive turning-point in solving the food problem,” it said.  [AFP]

This demand closely follows North Korea’s failure to meet last year’s food production needs, although some scholars suggest that international estimates of North Korea’s annual food needs have previously been overstated:

SAVELLI: Our latest assessment on the crop production of last year showed the country was suffering a large food deficit to feed its population. Right now the country is coming into the agricultural lean season which means that the crops of rice and maze from last year are rapidly running out and in the World Food Programme monitoring we are already seeing signs of stress in the population.

HEYDEMAN: South Korea’s unification ministry said in February that the North’s food production would fall more than one million tons short of demand this year. However, the World Food Program’s Lena Savelli says that figure underestimates the gravity of the situation.

SAVELLI: The latest assessment on crop production done by The Food and Agriculture Organisation and the World Food Programme puts the deficit even higher … as high as 1.8 million metric tons of food for the agriculture year 2009. We are planning to feed as many as 6.2 million people in the DPRK in 2009. Unfortunately we have not been able to raise enough resources to reach all the affected people. [Radio Australia]

North Korea can’t feed its people on its own, but that misses the important point that North Korea has more than enough cash on hand to import enough for them to eat:

McKAY: When the Soviet Union collapsed North Korea lost its major ally .. the ally that provided oil and technology and all kinds of things including cheap access to certain kinds of food but more particularly to access a cheap level a whole range of industrial products and those industrial products had ramifications for the agricultural sector. For example, fertiliser much of which is a by-product of petroleum is no longer available in North Korea. There is no fuel oil to drive the tractors and other kinds of machinery and that has had a major impact on North Korean productivity.

HEYDEMAN: North Korea has relied heavily on overseas aid to feed millions of its people. However North Korea in March refused to accept further food aid from the United States. South Korea, last year didn’t make its customary shipment of hundreds of thousands of tons of rice and fertiliser because the North failed to request the deliveries.

North Korea’s latest missile test alone could have fed thousands of people, but there are always higher priorities for Kim Jong Il’s assets.

Related: Tom Ricks makes only the thousandth prediction of imminent regime collapse in North Korea. One day, someone will win the office pool, but the more I consider North Korea, the less likely it seems that the regime expires due to a sudden popular uprising, and the more likely it seems that the regime will accelerate its decline by brutally suppressing one and opening schisms within the security forces. North Korea’s regions are still too mutually isolated for an uprising anywhere but Pyongyang to extinguish all of its power centers. More importantly, North Korea still lacks a cohesive national resistance organization, though a sufficiently brutal crackdown could catalyze that. For now, however, only some large, well-armed segment of the security forces is likely to succeed at overthrowing Kim Jong Il or his designated successor.