Pictures of the North Korean Countryside Show a Lean Year Unfolding

The photos are worth seeing, though I see no other evidence to support the photographer’s contention that the regime is relaxing its suppression of religion. A photograph of what are probably Peoples’ Safety Agency agents “praying” at a sham church in Pyongyang is not evidence that supports that contention.

On the other hand, there are numerous reports emerging from North Korea which support the contention that this year’s harvest will be way down from recent years, which themselves have been poor.

North Korea’s corn yield this year is expected to fall by 40 percent due to a fertilizer shortage and bad weather, the head of a Seoul-based aid group said Tuesday after a survey in the North. The North’s corn crop for this year is estimated to be less than 1.5 million tons, considerably down from the 2.5 million to 3 million tons it usually garners, said Kim Soon-kwon, a leading corn biologist and head of the International Corn Foundation. The forecast yield portends a severe food shortage in the country where corn is believed to make up 40 percent of the total food supply.

“Of all the corn harvests I’ve seen while visiting North Korea over the past 12 years, this year’s crop was the worst,” Kim said over the telephone from China where he was staying after last week’s trip to the North. [Yonhap]

That evidence is consistent with Open News’s alarming August report on a recent spike in corn prices.

I’ve noticed that North Koreans have learned to hoard food year by year, and that one bad harvest isn’t enough to plunge the country into famine because people somehow find a reserve on which to sustain themselves. But last year was also a bad year, and peoples’ stocks may well be replenished.

Now, private aid groups in South Korea are criticizing their government for not allowing them to provide aid to North Korea. To the extent they say that humanitarian aid should not be conditioned on the regime’s nuclear disarmament, they are right. We should be treating North Korea’s downtrodden as allies to be cultivated. But to the extent they want to embark on breakaway aid programs with insufficient controls on where the food goes, they’re wrong. Their intentions are good, but they’re only contributing to the problem.

The unavoidable conclusion about North Korea’s food situation is that the regime wants some people to eat, but either doesn’t care if the rest eat or simply wants them to starve. If so, then giving aid to the regime only allows it to feeds its military and members of the loyal castes, removing all of our bargaining power to monitor the aid and get it to those in greatest need. We’ll only have the bargaining power to get food into the bellies of the hungriest North Koreans when donors band together and demand, as one, sufficient monitoring controls, including nutritional surveys. Unilateral aid by breakaway NGO’s and governments is counterproductive to that greater good and only sustains the misery of the majority.