In North Korea, flood -> hunger, drought -> hunger, bumper harvest -> hunger

Last year, after two decades of almost interrupted crop failures, North Korea experienced its first good harvest since at least 2005, and possibly since 1992. Unfortunately, it looks like North Korea is regressing to the norm again, with KCNA claiming that North Korea is experiencing “its worst spring drought in more than three decades.”

It’s seldom wise to accept KCNA’s claims at face value, but even if one does, it’s worth remembering that none of the floods and droughts that North Korea reports every year ever caused a famine in South Korea. Do weather patterns stop at the DMZ? By contrast, every weather anomaly that hits North Korea results in a World Food Program appeal for food aid, and every time, we have the same old questions about whether the aid really reaches those who need it.

Will this drought plunge North Korea back into famine? No more than any other drought, flood, or bumper harvest during the last 20 years, since the time when members of North Korean’s expendable classes learned to smuggle and trade and survive through black-market capitalism.

What’s interesting is the extent to which major variations in domestic production have little apparent effect on the domestic food situation, at least as the World Food Program (our least-bad authority) describes it. After all, one would expect that after last year’s good harvest, North Koreans finally had enough to eat, right? Wrong. Instead, the U.N. WFP and the Food and Agriculture Organization reported that 84% of North Korean households had marginal or poor food consumption, and the WFP launched a two-year, $200 million appeal for more food aid from abroad.

Of course, Kim Jong Un could have more than satisfied that appeal himself, using the $300 million he instead spent on ski resorts and other white-elephant leisure facilities, or by simply confiscating less land and food. But rather than close North Korea’s food gap, Kim Jong Un chose to cut back on commercial imports of food from China instead.

Ironically, Kim is the one North Korean who doesn’t seem to be getting any thinner. In North Korea, harvests rise and fall, but hunger — at least for those on the lower tiers of North Korea’s caste system — is a constant. The inescapable conclusion is that North Korea calibrates the domestic food supply as a matter of state policy, perhaps to divert its spending on food to other purposes, and perhaps to maintain a more-or-less constant degree of hunger among the lower classes as a tool of control.