More food for hungry North Koreans is not “bad news” for sanctions proponents.
I don’t always agree with Scott Snyder’s views, but I’ve always enjoyed reading his work. In almost every case, I’ve found it to be well-researched and objective. In a blog post for the Council on Foreign Relations, Snyder cautiously concludes that North’s cereal production is “stable and improving” — from 5.93 million tons last year to 5.94 million tons this year, a more generous characterization than the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization report he cites, which calls North Korea’s food production “stagnant.” My own characterization would be “suspiciously constant.”
The UN FAO estimates that this year’s deficit will be 407,000 tons. That’s still low by historical North Korean standards, but hardly a sign that happy days are here again. The FAO also tells us that the impoverished government of North Korea only intends to import 300,000 tons, leaving an “uncovered deficit” of 107,000 tons. Here is Mercy Corps’s cue to tell us all how desperately North Korea needs food aid.
[Above: An actual sanctions target, riding aboard another sanctions target.]
At least the World Food Program shouldn’t have to worry about any lack of transport to do monitoring and assessment visits. Maybe His Porcine Majesty can even give Christine Ahn a ride in it, the next time she’s in Pyongyang to complain about how U.S. sanctions are starving North Korean babies.
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Snyder is honest enough to admit some weaknesses in his conclusion. For one, the UN FAO estimate he cites relies on Pyongyang’s own food production statistics, because this year (glasnost alert!), Pyongyang wouldn’t let the FAO do an on-the-ground food security assessment. But that’s no cause for alarm; after all, North Korea wouldn’t try to falsify information about its food supply or manipulate aid agencies, would it?
Snyder also admits that North Korea’s winter crops are falling well short of forecasts, a point that caused aid groups to warn of another food crisis recently:
“We’re concerned about seed scarcity and the low level rain and snowfall,” John Aylieff, deputy Asia director at the U.N.’s World Food Program, said from Pyongyang. “All of these things are raising concerns about the winter harvest this year.”
Winter crops — including wheat and barley — should be growing now, but after an exceptionally dry year in 2014, rainfall around the country has been markedly lower than usual so far this year, particularly in the “cereal bowl” provinces of Pyongan in the west and Hwanghae in the south.
Although the winter harvest makes up only 5 percent of North Korea’s domestic food supply, it is a critical time because the crops see the country through the lean season known locally as the barley hump — the period between May and August before rice and corn crops are harvested.
“If there is a big gap, this could prolong the lean season and it could prove a ‘flash point’ for malnutrition,” Aylieff said. [WaPo, Anna Fifield]
Take this with a grain of salt, too. I’ve often suspected that some aid groups exaggerate conditions in North Korea, whether to influence policy debates here or to rake in more donations. You can’t even blame them for it. If they don’t know where the trends are heading, they almost have to raise the alarm prematurely to be able to respond to a catastrophe in time.
Snyder also cites Andrei Lankov’s recent writings, which, as I’ve argued here and here, don’t look very well sourced to me, and haven’t held up well against better-sourced evidence. As a friend said about Andrei today, he’s always interesting, and often brilliant, even when he’s wrong. It still looks like wishful thinking to me — evidence that’s mostly apocryphal, ephemeral, or parochial, or a misattribution of market trends unrelated to regime policies.
We’ll know better by November. Meanwhile, obsessing over North Korean agricultural policies is like watching the paint dry on the side of a burning house. Hardly anyone still argues that Pyongyang is interested in broad, serious, structural reforms to its agricultural, economic, or political systems. No one believes they’ll cede their nuclear weapons. I doubt that anyone really knows what the true food situation is, including in Pyongyang. How could it be otherwise in a country where those who do not hoard, starve?
This bring us to another problem. Even if North Korea is growing more food, that doesn’t mean the people are eating more of it. It’s no good to produce more food if regime officials simply seize what they consider to be “surplus” crops for export. And as Snyder concedes, “growing income inequality in North Korea has resulted in continuing malnutrition among some sectors of the population, especially in rural areas.”
Two other interesting points in Snyder’s post reinforce this suspicion: first, North Korea has cut way back on its commercial food imports since the famine years. Second, it raised them again to adjust for a decline in external food aid. In other words, Pyongyang seems to be using commercial imports to calibrate the domestic food supply to a level that, according to the best evidence we have, is a pretty marginal one for 84% of North Koreans. That’s why I call the North’s food supply statistics “suspiciously constant.” We’ll pick that point up again in a moment.
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My main issue with Snyder’s post, however, is his conclusion:
North Korea’s apparent economic progress is bad news for those who expect increased sanctions to be decisive in driving North Korea to make a strategic choice to give up its nuclear weapons. So far, the effects of increased sanctions have been far from generating sufficient economic pressure to induce North Korea to make such a choice. Under current circumstances, there is nothing to stop North Korea from having its cake and its yellowcake, too.
Well, where does one begin with that? First, here again is the urban legend that our sanctions against North Korea have been strong, and thus properly tested as a tool of policy. For those who haven’t yet read it, I’ve refuted that argument here. It’s certainly true that sanctions have been enforced poorly by just about everyone — from the Chinese, to the South Koreans, to the Obama Administration, and most recently, the Russians. Private jets don’t import themselves, after all.
My real problem with Snyder’s argument, however, is its implication that sanctions would target North Korea’s food supply. I don’t know a single sanctions proponent who wants to target North Korea’s food supply or starve innocent people. Let’s have a look at the care H.R. 757, the North Korea Sanctions Enforcement Act, takes to avoid that, starting with Section 207(a)(2), which provides exemptions for imports of food and medicine:
There’s also a catch-all waiver provision at Section 207(b)(3) in the event a particular sanction has unintended humanitarian consequences:
We even wrote a provision at Section 207(d) that would allow the Treasury Department to license a responsible foreign bank to handle transactions to bring food and other humanitarian supplies into North Korea:
Of course, some banks could adopt excessively cautious interpretations of the law. The answer to that problem is for the Treasury Department to publish guidance and general licenses to give the banks peace of mind that transactions in food and aid don’t violate the law — promptly. As in, Treasury should start drafting that guidance now.
I’ll take this a step further: those of us who advocate for Kim Jong Un’s Götterdämmerung, and for policies that are just as content to catalyze that outcome as to extract change diplomatically, want the North Korean people to have more food, not less. Not only would that be far better for the North Korean people, it might hasten the regime’s overthrow. I’ve long argued that the regime uses hunger as a tool of control: it seeks to keep its people too weak and too exhausted to think of anything but survival. Historically, starving people do not overthrow their oppressors. People who overthrow their oppressors have enough to survive, and to seethe against the ruling class. It is the envy of oligarchs, not famine, that causes revolutions. An ample food supply would not preempt North Korea’s class war, but it would do much to free those on the lower regions of the songbun ladder to contemplate the differences between existence and life.
In short, there would be no “bad news” for any sanctions proponent in a rise in North Korea’s food supply. Pending sanctions legislation takes extreme pain to avoid reducing it. It is wrong to suggest that so many proponents of targeted sanctions legislation — chief among them, longstanding human rights advocates — are so callous about human life and suffering as to intentionally attack the food supply of Kim Jong Un’s victims. It’s an offense that could easily have been avoided by taking the time to read and understand the sanctions before implying as much.