Category: Famine & Food Aid

Starting around 2012, with a boost from an AP Pyongyang guided tour and some optimistic (but thinly sourced) analysis from Randall Ireson, Andrei Lankov, and others, a consensus formed among the pro-engagement school of North Korea watchers that Pyongyang was finally striking out on a bold new course of reform in an area of obvious need — its agriculture sector. In practice, the “reform” amounted to breaking up big collectives into smaller ones, and allowing collective farmers to keep and...

Although I have many, many unanswered questions about how the U.N. is able to fully assess exactly how many North Koreans are going hungry, let’s just stipulate that it’s a majority of those living outside Pyongyang: Nearly 70 percent of the North Korean population, roughly seven in 10 people, is undernourished, a U.S. broadcaster reported Wednesday, citing a U.N. report on the need for humanitarian aid to North Korea. According to the report released the previous day by the U.N....

With a government in control, it is impossible to reach those who are powerless without paying the powerful, and paying the President and the government will make them less interested in listening to their people. Instead of having to raise money through taxation and deliver services in return, they can instead use their people to extract money from donors. They can enrich themselves by keeping their population poor; such aid is an instrument of inequality. – Nobel Prize winning economist...

Two years ago, a U.N. Commission of Inquiry cited estimates that North Korea’s Great Famine of 1993 to 1999 killed up to 2 million people.* All of those deaths were needless — the regime spent those years wasting more than enough money to feed everyone who starved. By 1995, when Kim Jong-il finally let U.N. aid agencies in, hundreds of thousands (or more) had already died. The aid agencies, most prominently the World Food Program (WFP) and the Food and Agriculture...