Outside aid has failed to help a starving North Korean populace. If aid agencies are serious about helping they should make sure Kim Jong-il’s regime accounts for what it receives.
North Korea launched its first frantic diplomatic appeals for international food aid in early 1994 — over half a year before the September 1994 flooding, it’s worth noting, that was subsequently used as the official justification for the awkward call for foreign aid by this ostensibly self-reliant juche state.
Pyongyang’s appeal for international food aid continues to this very day: this year, North Korea has reportedly lodged requests for emergency humanitarian relief to the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), the South Korean government, the US State Department and even a number of developing countries. Thus North Korea’s ‘temporary’ food emergency has entered its 18th consecutive year, notwithstanding billions of dollars and millions of tons of humanitarian relief from the international community in the interim. So far as can be told, North Korea has lost the capacity to feed itself — an astonishing historical first for an urbanized, literate and industrialized society.
Why should Pyongyang — a government that seems to manage such tasks as building and testing atomic weapons and launching long-range ballistic missiles — be so manifestly incapable today of the basic task of feeding its own population? We must address, and convincingly answer, this fundamental question before we can even hope to craft a successful international strategy for redressing hunger in North Korea.
Very broadly speaking, North Korea’s now permanent food crisis must be understood as the consequence of four defining factors — all of them integral to the very nature of the North Korean state.
The first, of course, is North Korea’s distorted Soviet-style economy, which is more distorted than the Soviet Union’s economy ever was: much less productive, much more inefficient, permanently and desperately dependent upon flows of foreign aid just to keep on going in its own sputtering manner.
The second is the regime’s completely wrongheaded food self-sufficiency policy: this Northeast Asian economy is densely populated, with limited amounts of arable land, and long periods of cold weather, and the notion that it should be trying to grow its own food rather than exporting labor-intensive products to buy inexpensive calories abroad is an open-ended invitation for trouble.
The third factor is the North Korean government’s unique and long-standing war against its own consumers. Apart perhaps from Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, Pyongyang has more completely demonetized its economy, and more successfully reduced its subjects to dependence upon direct provision of supplies from their rulers, than any modern government; when the supply pipeline dried up, many hundreds of thousands of those subjects were condemned to a rendezvous with death.
All of these are structural problems, and are plain enough to see. But there’s also a fourth structural aspect to the North Korean hunger problem that is much less widely understood by outsiders: this relates to North Korea’s songbun system of politically assigned class status. In an important new study, Robert M. Collins explains the workings of this system, with its 50-plus distinct strata, ranging from highly favored ‘core’ classes to the so-called ‘hostile’ classes at the bottom. Life as a member of a designated ‘hostile’ class in North Korea is full of peril: tragedies deliberately inflicted by the state. Indeed, it’s no coincidence that the most desperate hunger North Koreans suffered over the past decade and a half was concentrated in the country’s northeast: in the provinces where the ‘hostile’ class members were predominantly resettled after the Korean War. Plainly put: during times of extreme food shortage the North Korean regime didn’t care too much if ‘hostile’ class members perished — and may actually have perceived some slight political benefit in those deaths.
Photo Credit: John Pavelka
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Joe
Getting around the rather typical sorchted earth conversational warfare, why doesn’t China do something more substantive to feed those innocent North Koreans?
Frankie Fook-lun Leung
The Arroyo Center at the Rand Corporation has just published a report on US-China Conflict. North Korea will be the most probable place of collision between China and USA. Highly recommended. The collapse of the North Korean regime would be a human catastrophe. That scenario must be borne in mind.
Frankie Fook-lun Leung
Unfortunately the author offered no solution. How do we do it if the government is a rogue and by its consistent conduct has deprived its people of enough food? North Korea is not the only guilty party in the world of rogue states. Some are worse than others. Undoubtedly the author gave a good analysis but he is short of solution.
Major Lowen Gil Marquez, Phil Army
Last decades ago China had embrace Capitalism because in embracing MAO s dictum will put the country in disarray economic factors in order to saved faces of communist they said capitalism with Chinese characters. In communist country its only the government personalities who were accumulating barrels of money while the poor proletariat and masses who supper most and resulted to total starving of its citizen as what happen to North Korea. . . the people of communist state should wake up on this. . . think of future generation so that they will not be a victim of communist dictator in the future. . THINK . . .
John Chan
The author is trying to politicize humanitarian aids, it is an insidious intent. No matter how bad the regime of NKorea is, ordinary North Koreans are innocent, they deserve to be helped. Using unarmed civilian to settle political scores is unethical and unconscience.
Charity and humanitarian aids are the ultimate expression of humanity, it is for give not for ask. Use human basic need to force others yield to your demands is a wrong thing to do.
Nicholas Eberstadt’s intrusive aid, active human rights intervention and responsible to protect are all too familiar slogans since WWII, they all leads to bombing and killing of their targeted victims; Yugoslavia, Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan, Libya, etc. were all started with Nicholas Eberstadt’s style seemly passionate calls and ended in bombing and killing until those nations were totally destroyed and plunged into decades of civil wars, misery and atrocity.
It seems NK would be the next target for USA’s bombing and killing practice field. I just wonder when would the compassionate westerners stop bringing their disastrous kindness to the victims?
Cam
@John chan,
Can you stop twisting facts to suit your need?. The facts are international aid (mostly come from you’re your hatred “Westpac” has fed the poor NKoreans at least a decade but failed to help a starving North Korean populace. The real problem is the “dear leader” Kim diverts those food aids to fatten his army for his “songgun” policy. The world has shown more compassionate to the poor, unlike you are lying non-stop.
What the Westpac did to China? Without the investments and aids from the Westpac and the Japanese for the last 3 decades, China is still dirt poor today. Even, those CCP members throw off their Mao suits for Western suits and embraced capitalism. The thing the aid agencies ask is to make sure the food aids come to the needy, not to the pockets of the communist bosses.
John Chan
@Cam,
Twisting and fabricating facts are the expertise of the anti-China clique like you. One minute the Westpac blamed China popping up the NKorea, next minute you said it was the Westpac keeping NKorea afloat. You better make up your mind which way you want to smear and bash.
China was the richest nation in the world, then the Westerners and Japanese came to China, they enriched themselves by selling Opium, looting, sacking and burning; and turned China into the poorest nation in the world. Now China worked hard and smart to reclaim its wealth, but you (the Westpac) wanted to claim it is their gracefulness to let China make a buck, if one does not call you shameless, and then I do not what is shameless.
You (the Westpac) are incompetent and squandered all the wealth you robbed from China, and fell into the biggest financial trouble ever occurred in the human history; are you preparing to repeat the immoral atrocity like your forefathers 170 years ago?
Cam
@John chan.
Without the “Westpac”, China would probably worse than NKorea today. Oh wait, you guys are the number 2 economically, right? you are boasting about Chinese strength non-stop, then why keep receiving the aids from the “Westpac” and the Japanese, who you have been insulting for years? Where is your self-esteem? Where is your integrity? You can’t have both ways, either you stop reaching out your hands to beg for aids from people you hate the most or you could continue to receive aids with a little appreciation. Fair enough?
John Chan
@Cam,
Indeed without the Westpac’s Opium, looting, sacking and burning, China would probably still be the richest in the world, Westpac would be the one begging for help like nowadays all these years.
No one is insulting Japan, those are the reminders about Japan’s true nature, although Japan is covered itself under a mask. Japan’s aids were its way to buy into China market. China wanted to help and give aids to the Japanese suffering from the natural disasters, but the heartless and egoistic Japanese politicians turned China’s aids down by ignoring the suffering of its own people.
If Japan repents its war crimes like the Germans, then no one would ever can keep on reminding the Japanese its ugly past, and Japanese do not need to face those unpleasant reminders, why do’t the Japanese do the right thing and repent like the Germans, instead of defending itself awkwardly like you are trying to do?