North Korean Harvest Output Declines Again

Reports of short harvests have been perennial in North Korea since 1993, but the worst of the famine probably ended in 2000. Some credit the end of the famine to international food aid, but North Korea’s own restrictions on international food aid have kept most of it out since late 2005. That year, I predicted — wrongly — that the result would be another famine. Although the regime’s severe cutback on food aid certainly must have caused hardship for many and starvation for some, there was no mass casualty famine in 2006 because of a development that I did not yet fully understand: the development of markets, legal and otherwise, which had quietly improved the distribution of North Korea’s meager food supply.

In his writings, Marcus Noland is fond of quoting the Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen, who has studied the anatomy of famines in history. Sen concludes that it’s not so much crop failures that cause famine, but artificial barriers that impede the distribution of food to everyone — the state’s misallocation of resources, restrictions on the market, disincentives to produce or distribute food, or other oppressive regulations.

Working from that basis, the Great Confiscation’s disruption of North Korea’s nascent market-based food distribution system is the greatest risk factor for plunging North Korea back into famine this year. This year, Noland is worried about not just decreased supply, but about impediments to distribution. On the one hand, since Noland expressed those worries, a wave of discontent and unrest may have shaken the regime’s determination to shut down the markets that most people depend on to survive (we’ll see). On the other hand, another bad harvest certainly can’t help matters:

North Korea’s food shortage is expected to further worsen this year, as the communist state’s grain output in 2009 is believed to have fallen from the previous year, a government official in Seoul said Wednesday.

The North is estimated to have produced 4.1 million tons of grain last year, a drop of about 200,000 tons compared to 2008, the Unification Ministry official said on condition of anonymity. The amount falls about 1.3 million tons short of what the impoverished country needs this year to feed its 24 million people, the official said. The North produced 4.3 million tons in 2008. [Yonhap]

But when you compare those figures to those of previous years, this year’s harvest isn’t substantially worse than that of 2007, a year in which North Korea experienced severe flooding, or the years before that. The regime and its apologists are fond of blaming North Korea’s food problems on U.S. sanctions and natural disasters, but in fact, the U.S. has always traditionally been the largest donor to the World Food program’s aid efforts in North Korea, it is the regime itself that rejects American food aid, U.N. sanctions specifically exempt humanitarian aid, and cereal grain production in North Korea has hovered near the 4 million ton level for the last several years regardless of weather conditions in the North. If famine were really a function of natural disasters, why doesn’t the same weather ever cause famine in South Korea? The obvious answer is that the North Korean regime is unaccountable to its people and disinterested in their needs.

A bad harvest will likely drive food prices up to a point where some won’t be able to afford to pay them. Still, I’ll speculate that a large new famine is unlikely this year because the North Korean people are finally able to do what the law of comparative advantage dictates that their rulers should have been doing all along — importing food. Thus, the single most hopeful part of North Korea’s food situation this year is the rise of food smuggling on a large scale. Food smuggling may wrench the food supply from the regime’s hands once and for all and do more to address hunger in North Korea than anything the World Food Program has been allowed to do yet.