North Korea and China Feast Amid Famine

As the food situation in North Korea continues to deteriorate for its most vulnerable, a South Korean NGO is sending 300 tons of flour and other supplies to help feed 12,000 “marginalized” people, including kids in 50 orphanages. The article mentions nothing about monitoring or nutritional surveys, so pray to a God they can’t that there will be a few dollops of gruel left for their begging bowls after all of the theft, diversion, and corruption.

Note, by the way, this seemingly significant fact near the bottom of AFP’s article: “Pyongyang has also rejected some aid.” It’s too bad the reporter doesn’t tell her readers whose aid was rejected (America’s), why the regime rejected it (its aversion to monitoring), and how many kids it might have fed.

Still, the leader of the world’s most egalitarian society can’t let a little famine interrupt his feast, so he’s throwing a banquet for the Chinese Ambassador to thank his government for helping him undermine U.N. proliferation sanctions. China is not only doing this by funding Kim Jong Il’s regime directly; it is also using its considerable influence in Washington, asking that “sanctions enforcement be dropped as a precondition for their return to multilateral talks.” If past experience is any guide, the State Department and the Washington think tank chorus would be ebullient about this, since few of them see any higher purpose than talking, even if North Korea sees no higher purpose than stalling and obfuscation. Kim Jong Il finds talks to be just one useful vehicle to achieve this.

Unfortunately, China might get its way even as the sanctions start to put real pressure on the regime. Amid North Korea’s obscene coexistence of feast and famine, President Obama may be preparing to offer North Korea an aid-for-talks deal, that is, food aid in exchange for simply returning to six-party talks. Marcus Noland, who is more concerned about feeding the hungry, doesn’t like where this is headed:

Noland warned such deals to bring the North back to the table could have a negative effect in the long run and that rejoining the talks may simply be aimed at securing external support in order to control the shaky internal situation.

“Unfortunately, this kind of linkage is likely to degrade the humanitarian aid program as well as provide North Korea an opportunity to parlay self-created disputes in one arena into concessions in another, as well as undercutting (South Korea, which has) acted with admirable restraint,” he said. [Korea Times]

Not only do I share Noland’s distaste for linking humanitarian aid to nuclear diplomacy, the more time passes, the more I doubt that the humanitarian benefit of food aid is really doing much good for the North Korean people. Having watched North Korea’s food situation closely for the last six years, I’ve seen far more linkage between the food situation for ordinary North Koreans and the functioning of markets than to the arrival of food aid, which we’ve always suspected the regime of diverting, whether at the macro or the micro level. Not only do I have little confidence that aid would feed those who really need it, I have little confidence that the State Department would demand effective monitoring, such as nutritional surveys that ensure that the recipients are regaining health and weight as the aid program continues. North Korea has always rejected effective forms of monitoring as a condition of U.N. or U.S. food aid programs. Why should we think that North Korea will be more flexible when we’re also linking this negotiation to our demands for talks and disarmament?

If we accept that food aid has receded as a significant part of North Korea’s food supply, Open News delivers some rare good news: North Korea’s resilient markets have largely recovered from the Great Confiscation, and for the time being, the price of rice is even falling. I tend to suspect that these reports are more reflective of local and temporary conditions, they’re still a very good sign that Kim Jong Eun won’t repeat his father’s performance by causing an inaugural famine.

For what it’s worth, at least some in the Administration continue to signal their intent to adhere to a hard line on sanctioning the regime that has created all of this misery:

The United States will continue to take a tough line on North Korea at a time when the latter is a “broken state,” John Hamre, former U.S. deputy secretary of defense and now leader of a Washington-based think tank, said Wednesday.

“The posture (of the United States) is we’re happy to negotiate with North Korea if North Korea agrees that its current strategy is wrong,” said Hamre, president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), at a forum in Seoul. “It continues to rely on nuclear intimidation and that’s not a solution, it’s not a strategy and we will not accept it.” [….]

“We do not need to beg the North to work with us. We need to just be very confident,” he said, adding that perhaps the best tactic would be to hold up South Korea’s success for those in the North to see. [Korea Times]

It would be unfortunate if Noland is right that the Administration will let State seize defeat from the jaws of victory again. It’s probably too soon to assess the deal or its full significance unless and until we see the details and scale. Still, I often suspect that the East Asia Bureau is so obsessed with making a deal with Kim Jong Il and redeeming all of the effort it has invested in failure that it can’t stand the thought of North Korea simply ceasing to exist.