[OFK:  In this post, Marcus Noland and Stephan Haggard respond to  Part 1 and Part 2 of my  review of their book, “Famine in North Korea:  Markets, Aid, and Reform.”] Josh Stanton has written by far the most thoughtful and cogent analysis of Famine in North Korea that we have seen to date. Stanton’s review is generous, but also raises important questions about virtually all elements of our analysis. In the interest of furthering both scholarly and policy debate, we...

[Part I is here.]   IV.  Aid We will probably never know how many people died in North Korea’s last Great Famine, but can we prevent the next one?  This regime  seems so  indifferent to the suffering of its people — even  determined to perpetuate it — that well-meaning aid agencies have  been forced to compromise basic humanitarian norms.  Those compromises are understandable, but the standards were meant to keep food from being used as a political weapon.  The compromises...

The time stamp on this post may be the most telling part of it, for I first got my hands on Marcus Noland and Stephan Haggard’s “Famine in North Korea:  Markets, Aid, and Reform” back in late March.  The intervening months have been very busy for me, and the book raised more points of discussion than I can cover here.  Noland and Haggard  are two of the finest, most respected scholars of all things North Korean and economic, and their...