PYONGYANG WATCH North Korea: And still they
starve By Aidan
Foster-Carter
What's news? In my country,
apparently, it's the rutting of three unmarried people
who work - or did - for England's Football Association.
(FA for short, perhaps appropriately.)
Not that
such trivia wholly blots out the real world. As ever,
crises come and go. Darfur in Sudan is currently the new
flavor of the month, and rightly so. But our attention
spans are short, and the media circus will soon move on
to horrors new. Darfur may still fester, but it will be
off our television screens. As TS Eliot said, "Humankind
cannot bear very much reality." (So-called "reality TV"
is, of course, the exact opposite: arch navel-gazing
narcissism.)
After almost a decade, hungry North
Koreans are no longer news. But they're still there, and
still hungry. On Monday the official Korean Central News
Agency (KCNA) reported the latest in what seems an
annual weather onslaught: usually floods, but sometimes
drought.
According to KCNA, the July rains have
flooded at least 100,000 hectares of fields, and made
1,000 families homeless. Harvests in affected areas are
expected to fall by at least 30%. Roads and railways
have also been hit in the center and south of the
country.
No specific places were named, so maybe
this is a nationwide roundup. The figure for
homelessness could be worse, but 100,000 hectares is
almost 4% of North Korea's total arable land.
Moscow sends wheat All of which makes
new grain just in from Moscow all the more timely. Also
on Monday, but seemingly before this latest flood news
(which went unmentioned), the United Nations (UN) World
Food Program (WFP) praised its first donation ever from
Russia. On Sunday the ship MV Kallisto (Greek for "most
beautiful", if memory serves) began discharging 34,700
tonnes of wheat, worth US$10 million, at Nampo, the port
for Pyongyang. Moscow had long been a, indeed the, major
all-around aid donor to North Korea, mainly in the
Soviet era. But this seems to be the first time it has
chosen to channel food aid multilaterally.
A
week earlier, the other power that sundered Korea in
1945 chipped in too. On July 23 the United States said
it would give 50,000 tonnes of grain to WFP. That's a
lot less than the 100,000 tonnes it gave last year, let
alone the 200,000 tonnes in 2002. Ironically, axis of
evil or no, US President George W Bush has kept feeding
North Korean leader Kim Jong-il. The politics of US farm
support plays a part here; plus, as now, the timing is
usually political. Bizarrely, the Democratic People's
Republic of Korea was at one point the top recipient of
US food aid in Asia: since 1996 it has received
something more than 2 million tonnes.
Yet it
isn't enough. As other calls have arisen - Afghanistan,
Iraq, Darfur - while Kim Jong-il prefers guns (nay,
nukes) to butter, donor fatigue has set in. Initially
WFP saw its appeals for North Korea almost fully met -
although other agencies, like the United Nations
Children's Fund (UNICEF), have all along had
difficulties securing funding for their far more modest
budgets in North Korea.
Donor
fatigue Now WFP is feeling the pinch too. Having
appealed for 484,000 tonnes this year to feed 6.5
million of North Korea's most vulnerable - that's almost
30% of the population - with 2004 more than half over,
it has received confirmed pledges for just 125,000
tonnes.
I should rephrase that. When aid dries
up, it's hungry North Koreans who feel the pinch. For
the past two years, falling donations have forced WFP to
halt crucial supplemental rations to millions of
designated recipients for long periods. In June and July
just gone, over 2 million core beneficiaries, including
many young children, pregnant women and nursing mothers,
went without cereal rations. Thanks to Russia, these can
now resume.
But 300,000 elderly people will
still have to go without. Nor will the new aid last
long. WFP's country director, Richard Ragan, warns that
there is "little aid in the pipeline for the latter
months of the year ... We urgently need firm commitments
to plug that gap."
Some aid comes through other
channels. South Korea is giving (lending, in theory) its
usual 400,000 tonnes of rice; Seoul may buy some from
Vietnam, as part of last week's deal on South Korea's
receiving the North's refugees via Vietnam. Some
southern rice has already been delivered - overland,
which is a first. Japan, once a major donor, will give
rice worth $10 million now that Pyongyang has let the
children of Japanese abductees leave (though Washington
purports to deny any linkage.)
Barely
surviving Still, and though the acute famine of
the late 1990s has passed, many North Koreans are barely
surviving. Here's what counts as progress in Kim
Jong-il's 21st century people's paradise. Whereas a 1998
survey found 60% of children suffering acute
malnutrition, by 2002 "only" 40% were so afflicted. Even
this gain may be eroded, if food doesn't come.
Adults suffer too. According to WFP, "much of
the population is afflicted by critical dietary
deficiencies, consuming very little protein, fat and
micronutrients." In a country two-thirds urban - yes,
North Korea had an industrial revolution, once, before
they blew it - the worst-off are city-dwellers outside
Pyongyang, the relatively privileged capital.
These people rely on what is left of the Public
Distribution System (PDS), the old state rationing
system. Once comprehensive, the PDS now provides just
300 grams a day, less than half a survival ration. WFP
adds that 70% of households dependent on PDS can't get
the daily calories they need.
Meaning,
presumably, that they can't afford to supplement this
from the private markets that have sprung up in the past
two years to bridge the gap - if they could afford them
to begin with. Ironically, if typical of transition
economies, the belated slow dawning of economic sense in
North Korea since mid-2002 has aggravated unequal access
to food. Though essential, market principles are no
instant panacea; indeed, they create new divisions and
vulnerabilities.
Defectors: What
aid? What to do? The humane urge to help - and I
do urge you to help - then stumbles on the likes of Lee
Kum-kwan, who fled North Korea in 2002 and now works for
a South Korean religious group helping North Koreans in
China. Lee told the Korea Times on Monday that his first
taste of South Korean ramyon noodles was as a security
policeman in Pyongyang. Before that, "I'd never heard of
or seen international aid, not to mention South Korean
food aid. Most North Koreans would be the same."
More privileged still than noodle-eating police,
said Lee, 28, were the guys right next door: Kim
Jong-il's guard corps, "the most powerful military unit
in the North, whose soldiers are only allowed to eat
rice". Lee claims that most of the North's national
budget and international aid is funneled to Kim's guards
- and also that German beef aid was taken back after
being handed out, as soon as international monitors were
out of sight.
The latter, he admits, is hearsay
from an aunt. Even if some such tales are exaggerated,
anyone aiding North Korea must do so in full knowledge
of some unpalatable truths.
First, all this
suffering is the fault of a vicious and obtuse regime.
In 2004, Kim Jong-il still chooses guns over butter.
Under the Songun (army-first) policy, the
military gets the lion's share of resources; the
civilian economy just gets the crumbs. Nukes don't come
cheap. They also have a huge opportunity cost - meaning
aid and investment forgone, or which would flow in if
only the Dear Leader Kim Jong-il followed Colonel
Muammar Gaddafi and saw the light.
Second, it
was lousy policy that created the famine. Even floods
aren't just an act of God. Reckless terracing of steep
hills caused deforestation and erosion, increasing
vulnerability to floods and loss of cropland. Third,
whether or not actual food aid is diverted, North Korea
obviously is free to send more of its own rice - or that
of donors who don't ask awkward questions, like China
and South Korea - to the military. To that extent, the
diversion debate is a bit of a red herring.
So
what to do? To me, the humanitarian imperative - feed my
sheep, to coin a phrase - is still paramount. WFP, and
the many non-governmental organizations active in North
Korea, indubitably save lives. Hopefully, too, they are
winning hearts and minds, showing that not all
foreigners are the imperialist devils of Pyongyang
propaganda.
Indeed, while their own so-called
"great leaders" inflicted famine, it was and is
foreigners who mainly helped. One day, North Koreans
will know this. That should be interesting.
Aidan Foster-Carter is honorary senior
research fellow in sociology and modern Korea, Leeds
University, England.
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