Famine, food policy, and the lost lessons of history

A drought, exacerbated by disastrous agricultural policies, causes widespread famine. A divided Congress, unsure about feeding an enemy, reluctantly agrees to send aid. A paranoid, totalitarian government obstructs the delivery of the aid, infiltrates and spies on aid organizations, and diverts food from starving children to a loyal elite. Desperate victims resort to cannibalism.

Back in America, politics continues to intrude — the hard right wants to starve a Marxist-Leninist government into submission, while the hard left sympathizes with the regime and accuses aid workers of blaming it unfairly to undermine it. It’s not North Korea in the 1990s, or today. It’s Russia in 1921, and the hero of this tragedy is Herbert Hoover, who headed a humanitarian relief agency before his presidency.

The analogy holds up brilliantly until, at the 30 minute mark, Hoover’s deputy confronted undeniable evidence of diversion and obstructionism. He sent Hoover a cable, knowing that the Cheka would intercept and read it, recommending that no more aid be delivered unless the obstructionism ended immediately. The Soviets, knowing what Hoover was made of, backed down. The aid flowed again, and Russia’s famine ended — for a while, at least — when the next harvest came in.

There is no guarantee that Kim Jong-Il would have responded to a similar challenge the way Lenin did, although we’ve seen recently that North Korea is sensitive to public criticism of its treatment of its people. But the question is a counterfactual; no one of Herbert Hoover’s stature and character came to help the people of North Korea, although Andrew Natsios might have been that man had the U.N. not been in overall control. The fact that the U.N. does not produce men like Herbert Hoover and Andrew Natsios, and that the U.S. government only seldom does, goes far to explain why North Korea is still in a food crisis today.