North Korea and the politics of
famine PART 1: Failure in the
fields By John Feffer
Introduction Access to food is a
basic human right. For several decades, the
Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK -
North Korea) prided itself on meeting the food
needs of its population, although it has little
arable land. Like many socialist countries, North
Korea emphasized this success - along with high
literacy rates, an equitable health-care system,
and guaranteed jobs for all - as proof that it
upheld human rights, that its record in fact
exceeded
that of Western
countries.
By the late 1980s and early
1990s, however, a deteriorating economy and a
steep rise in the cost of energy, followed in
mid-decade by a series of natural disasters,
undercut North Korea's capacity to feed its
population. The public distribution system
collapsed, and famine ensued. [1] Pyongyang
appealed to its neighbors and then the world at
large for help.
Through the United
Nations, famine relief for North Korea became a
global concern. The UN's World Food Program (WFP),
in the largest aid program in its history, fed
more than one-third of North Korea's population.
For most countries, bilateral food aid became
their only significant form of engagement with the
DPRK. For many aid organizations, famine relief
not only equaled engagement, it represented
human-rights work.
"There is no hierarchy
in human rights," explained Erica Kang of the
South Korean non-governmental organization (NGO)
Good Friends. "But if you don't have any food on
the table and your child is undernourished, the
first thing on your mind is food. The right to
food is one of our first priorities." [2] Food aid
helped to meet the needs - and uphold the right to
food - of millions of North Koreans. The
correlation between food and human rights in the
DPRK has not been an altogether positive one,
however. In the 1980s, human-rights organizations
began to document the extent of North Korea's
violations in the civil and political spheres,
including political labor camps, the lack of
freedom of speech and assembly, and the collective
punishment of families for the crimes of an
individual.
In the 1990s, these accounts
became more detailed and cross-checkable via
interviews with an increasing number of North
Koreans in China and South Korea. The same food
crisis that prompted humanitarian relief also
supplied the outside world with more details of
the political and social reality within the DPRK.
At this time, too, allegations surfaced
regarding the diversion of food aid, the
distribution of food according to political
classification, and the designation of parts of
the country as lost causes. Complaining that
Pyongyang restricted their humanitarian
operations, such groups as Medecins Sans
Frontieres (MSF) and CARE pulled out of North
Korea and rejected further engagement with the
DPRK.
Reports in 1999 from the US General
Accounting Office and the US Institute of Peace
echoed these criticisms. In its first term, the
administration of President George W Bush
responded to concerns about inadequate monitoring
by reducing US contributions to the WFP.
What had previously been two relatively
separate approaches to North Korea - food aid
versus human-rights criticism - have thus
converged. The right to food, which humanitarian
organizations emphasized in their operations, has
become yet another arena in which critics have
castigated Pyongyang's record. A former rationale
for engagement has morphed into an argument for
disengagement.
Although both the MSF and
Action Contre la Faim published some materials in
support of their decision to withdraw from North
Korea in the late 1990s, the first major broadside
in the language of food as a human-rights issue
came from Jean Ziegler, the UN Special Rapporteur
on the Right to Food.
In his February 2001
report, he penned the much-cited sentence that
after 1995, "it gradually became clear that most
of the international aid was being diverted by the
army, the secret services, and the government".
[3]
After a short interval, human-rights
organizations zeroed in on the issue. Amnesty
International published "Starved of Rights" in
early 2004, [4] and the South Korean NGO Good
Friends issued its report "North Korean Human
Rights and the Food Crisis" in March of the same
year. [5]
Last September, Stephan Haggard
and Marcus Noland distilled these concerns into a
report for the US Committee for Human Rights in
North Korea. [6] Human Rights Watch followed up
with "A Matter of Survival" this May. [7]
All of these reports leveled charges
against the DPRK. Haggard and Noland put the
charges in the strongest terms: Pyongyang was
"culpably slow" in responding to the famine, did
not use funds to import food during the worst of
the crisis, diverted food aid away from the
neediest recipients, and blocked assistance to the
hardest-hit parts of the country.
North
Korea is not the first place to experience the
collision of human rights and humanitarianism. In
international conflicts such as Kosovo and Rwanda
and in other famine situations such as Biafra and
Ethiopia, champions of human rights and
humanitarian relief often butted heads.
Humanitarian organizations focused on
delivering essential goods and services to satisfy
basic human rights (to food and shelter). But they
sometimes drew criticism for not addressing the
situation of civil and political rights or
systemic political abuses - in other words, the
structures within which they had to operate.
This dilemma was both tactical (what
problems should be tackled first?) and
philosophical (is there a hierarchy of human
rights, with food being the most important, or
should all human rights, economic as well as
political, be treated with equal emphasis?).
To understand this conflict between human
rights and humanitarianism in North Korea, we will
separate the problem into four questions:
1. Was the DPRK famine the result of
unexpected external causes such as weather,
unanticipated failures of state and local policy,
or easily foreseeable system breakdown? This
question will require analysis of North Korea's
agricultural system and the difficulties it
encountered in the 1980s and 1990s. 2.
How can we evaluate the factual basis of the
subsequent charges that North Korean officials
engaged in human-rights violations in the sphere
of food policy during the famine era? This
question will necessitate a closer semantic
scrutiny of terms such as diversion and
monitoring. 3. How have agricultural
and market reforms more generally altered the
food-policy calculations in North Korea,
particularly as they pertain to meeting the needs
of the most disadvantaged? This question will
spark a discussion of the relationship between
famine/food aid and market mechanisms.
4. What are the policy implications of
this debate about food and human rights? This
discussion will lead us to an evaluation of
strategies of linkage, the relationship between
food aid and political change, and the current
controversy over bilateral versus multilateral
assistance. [8]
In answering these
questions, this essay will reflect a philosophy
that integrates human-rights concerns with
economic engagement. Humanitarian disasters in
illiberal environments require such an integrative
approach.
To understand North Korea's
particular dynamic, though, we must also tackle
the question of power as it relates to
sovereignty. Cognizant of trans-border issues such
as environmental pollution, nuclear proliferation,
and accelerated financial flows, most countries
have relinquished a certain portion of their
national sovereignty to craft global solutions to
global problems. This trend has intensified since
the Cold War.
The DPRK, though it belongs
to several international organizations and is a
party to numerous international agreements,
remains locked in a Westphalian political model
that stresses territorial integrity and national
self-determination. Relations with other countries
fall under the communist-era rubric of "peaceful
co-existence". This divergence on the issue of
sovereignty isolates North Korea in an
increasingly globalizing era.
But the
conflict is not as simple as the DPRK versus the
rest of the world. Nation-states practice in
essence three types of sovereignty. Employing a
sovereignty of the weak, countries like North
Korea use Westphalian notions as a fragile shield
against challenges from the outside. Wielding a
hegemonic sovereignty of the strong, the United
States and other superpowers place their national
interests above those of other countries and
justify intervention on the basis of an assumed
consensus of values such as democracy and
stability. Citing a sovereignty of international
law, mid-level states attempt to contain the
hegemonic impulses of the strong and acquire a
level playing field for the rest. Countries might
deploy different understandings of sovereignty
depending on the situation.
The battles
between North Korea and those providing it with
food aid might appear to revolve around different
definitions of human rights. Beneath this surface
conflict, however, is a more fundamental
disagreement over sovereignty, with Pyongyang
perceiving superpower designs behind the
sovereignty of international law. The conflict
between human rights and humanitarianism cannot be
resolved without clarifying this underlying
dispute about sovereignty.
Although the
controversy regarding food and human rights in
North Korea largely stems from matters now a
decade old, the issue is all too current. Heavy
rains and flooding this July have once again
plunged the DPRK into a precarious food situation.
Pyongyang is ambivalent about receiving
international food assistance, and charges of
human-rights abuses in the food realm have once
again surfaced. The conflicts between
international human-rights norms and conceptions
of state sovereignty continue to bedevil efforts
to save lives in North Korea - and have
considerable implications for how the world
approaches similar humanitarian crises elsewhere
in a changing world system.
PART 1:
Failure in the fields Both South Korean
and North Korean agriculture have roots in the
Japanese model promulgated during the colonial
period. About 30 years more advanced than Korea in
its agricultural science, Japan applied its
technological advances in seeds, irrigation, and
fertilizer and pesticide use on the Korean
Peninsula in the first half of the 20th century.
[9]
In the post-World War II period, when
the Japanese system became the initial model for
the Green Revolution - on the basis of its dwarf
grain varieties and reliance on high-energy inputs
- both Koreas continued to use heavy applications
of fertilizer and pesticide to boost yields. [10]
Both countries, too, relied on mechanization to
increase efficiency. Agricultural productivity
came to depend on rapid industrialization. [11]
Higher agricultural yields, particularly in the
early years of the Cold War, were not merely a
sign of the success of the farming sector but a
litmus test for the very legitimacy of the
respective regimes.
After a half-century
of colonialism, both North and South Korea valued
food self-sufficiency. For North Korea, such a
goal was not an entirely unreasonable proposition.
Although lacking arable land, North Korea's ratio
of cropland to population is comparable to the
United Kingdom's and better than those of Israel
and Vietnam. More to the point, North Korea's
ratio is higher than that of Japan or South Korea
- 0.11 vs 0.04 and 0.05 respectively. [12] Its
overall climate is colder than Japan's or South
Korea's. But the region that became North Korea
served as an important agricultural supplier of
the Japanese Empire - specifically potatoes and
millet [13] - and agriculture continues to employ
about one-third of the population.
Self-sufficiency was not, however, easy
for North Korea to achieve. Pyongyang often had to
fall back on importing food, for instance between
1969 and 1974 and increasingly between 1986 and
1993. [14] But at some point in between, according
to the US Central Intelligence Agency, the DPRK
attained near self-sufficiency in grain. [15]
North Korea even claimed production of 10 million
tons of grain at the end of the second seven-year
plan in 1984, though South Korean sources provide
a more realistic figure of 6.26 million tons. [16]
In the 1970s, North Korea made two policy
mistakes, one common and the other uncommon. The
uncommon mistake was to continue on the path of
food autarky while South Korea and Japan began to
integrate themselves into the international food
system. North Korea even began to deviate from the
Soviet bloc.
At this time, the Soviet
Union and Eastern Europe went from net exporters
of food to net importers as they concentrated more
on manufacturing consumer products and importing
enough grain to support increased livestock
production. The citizens of the Soviet bloc ate
higher off the hog but at the expense of their
government's new dependency on international grain
markets. While North Korea was willing to adapt
its juche philosophy of self-reliance in
the 1970s to take out loans from Western countries
- largely to import technology for its industrial
sector - it continued to pursue its special form
of food-security policy.
The common
mistake that North Korea made in the 1970s was to
continue to base its agriculture on the foundation
of relatively inexpensive energy. As energy became
more expensive, first during the two oil crises of
the 1970s and later when the Soviet Union and then
China moved to hard-currency transactions,
agricultural inputs such as fertilizer and
pesticides as well as the fuel to power mechanized
equipment became costlier. Large agricultural
producers such as the United States and Canada
could rely on domestic sources of energy.
North Korea had coal and hydroelectric
power, but no oil or natural gas to speak of. It
did not help that North Korea's farm machinery was
quite energy-inefficient, that DPRK agronomists
didn't recognize until 2000 the declining utility
of large-scale fertilizer application, and that
expanded production to marginal land contributed
to wide-scale soil erosion. [17] In other words,
cheap energy had concealed for some time that
North Korean agriculture was ecologically
unsustainable.
As a result of these two
principal errors, North Korea's food problems
began to accelerate. South Korean scholar Lee Suk
points to the steady decline in rations in the
1970s and 1980s. [18] A foreign resident of
Pyongyang reported in 1987 that "apart from grain,
there is not much else to eat". [19] The 1987
allocation of wasteland for rural factory workers
to use for private farming and the increased
frequency of farmers' markets in the late 1980s
(expanding from once every 10 days to daily) both
suggest that the public distribution system was
losing its capacity to meet basic needs. [20]
Heavy flooding in 1990 prompted North
Korea to cut daily food rations nearly in half and
for the first time to appeal to international aid
organizations. [21] The "let's eat two meals a
day" campaign, clearly a euphemism for greater
scarcity, began in 1991. According to defectors,
food riots in 1991 led to the mobilization of
4,000 Korean People's Army troops and, when the
soldiers joined the rioters, 3,000 political
security troops. [22] Interestingly, in response
to the North Korean government's first request for
aid, the WFP visited the country in 1991 and found
no grounds for humanitarian relief. [23] It is
tempting to speculate that the government invited
the UN aid agency for economic reasons but
couldn't divulge people's actual living conditions
for political reasons. [24]
The end of the
Cold War in Europe and the collapse of the Soviet
Union only made matters worse, for Pyongyang could
no longer leverage its geopolitical position
vis-a-vis Beijing and Moscow. By the beginning of
1992, Kim Il-sung announced in his New Year's
address that the year would be one of "put greater
efforts into agriculture". [25]
In 1993,
cold weather reduced the food supply by 500,000
tons. Hail damage in 1994 caused a 1.2 million ton
reduction. [26] A poor Chinese harvest reduced
1994 exports to North Korea by half, so the DPRK
turned to South Korea and Japan in 1995 for aid
and commercial imports. [27] According to Andrew
Natsios, North Korea also asked for food aid at
this point from the United States but was told
that only conditions of famine would release any
shipments. [28] When the heavy rains and floods
hit in 1995, famine indeed struck the country, and
Pyongyang appealed to the international community
for assistance. This time, the international
community responded.
This historical
discussion is necessary to establish several
important facts. Unlike catastrophes in other
planned economies, North Korea's food crisis did
not originate in the decision to collectivize
farms, to starve a political opposition, or to
implement untested agricultural reforms. The
famine resulted from a continuation of policies,
not a radical departure from them. It was the sad
but logical consequence of relying on high inputs
of energy and striving for self-sufficiency in the
interest of national security.
Pyongyang's
failure to come to grips with the unsustainability
of its agricultural enterprise during an era of
cheap energy resembles the predicament of many
nations seduced by Green Revolution promises. The
second error, the policy of self-reliance, was
common in East Asia in the postwar era. But the
DPRK maintained an autarkic food policy - even
after its communist allies abandoned theirs -
influenced by the same nationalist urge to retain
strict sovereignty that inspired Park Chung-hee's
New Village Movement (Saemaul Undong) [29] and
Japan's postwar efforts to achieve rice
self-sufficiency.
Also, as Randall Ireson
plausibly argues, it was not North Korea's pursuit
of food self-sufficiency per se that was at issue
but the way it pursued this goal. Observing
environmental and economic constraints, North
Korea could even today attain a measure of
self-sufficiency in the agricultural sector. [30]
Although Pyongyang clearly recognized the
decline in agricultural production, the effects of
the natural disasters that intensified in 1995
were unexpected. The flooding and drought did not
cause the famine, but they could be said to have
triggered the crisis and caught government
officials unprepared. As such, neither as a result
of policy errors nor as a function of natural
disasters can the ensuing famine be construed as a
deliberate or a desired outcome for the North
Korean government.
Nor can the DPRK
leadership be accused of "culpable slowness" in
its response to the unfolding crisis. [31]
Pyongyang attempted agricultural reform, though of
the too-little, too-late variety. It began to ask
for international assistance as early as 1990. Its
food imports rose between 1986 and 1993 to cope
with shortages. It approached its traditional
enemies - South Korea, Japan, and the United
States - for assistance even at the risk of
undermining its central doctrine of
self-sufficiency.
According to a 1999
interpretation of the right to food by the UN
Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights,
"It is important to distinguish the inability from
the unwillingness of a state party to comply."
[32] North Korea was willing but ultimately unable
to ward off famine. If anything, it is the
international community that reacted with culpable
slowness, for it took two years before
international donors responded on a significant
scale to Pyongyang's requests. [33]
The
tragedy of North Korea's food policy in the 1980s
and early 1990s was not one of criminal negligence
but rather of blind allegiance to the modernizing
ideology of high-energy agriculture and the
nationalist chimera of complete food
self-sufficiency. This was bad policy. Considering
that as much as 10% of the population died in the
late 1990s, this was in fact atrocious policy. The
question remains, however, whether placing this
tragedy in a human-rights framework helps clarify
the causes of the famine, the North Korean
government's response to it, or international
policies adopted in the aftermath. In determining
causality, this framework has proved unhelpful,
though the human-rights perspective does clarify
other issues.
Notes [1]
There is some controversy over the use of the term
"famine" to describe the food crisis that North
Korea experienced in the 1990s. I use the term
here to refer to "systematic starvation" as
opposed to simply widespread hunger or
malnutrition. As for the number of deaths
attributable to this famine, it remains difficult
to be precise, with figures cited anywhere between
200,000 and 3.5 million. [2] Interview with
Erica Kang, December 7, 2005. [3] Jean
Ziegler, "Economic, Social and Cultural Rights:
The Right to Food", Commission on Human Rights,
E/CN.4/2001/53, February 7, 2001. [4] Amnesty
International, "Starved of Rights: Food and Human
Rights in the Democratic People's Republic of
Korea (DPRK)", January 17, 2004; accessed on the
Internet April 27,
2006. [5] "Good Friends, North Korean Human
Rights and the Food Crisis" (Seoul: Good Friends,
March 2004). [6] Stephan Haggard and Marcus
Noland, "Hunger and Human Rights: The Politics of
Famine in North Korea" (Washington: US Committee
for Human Rights in North Korea, 2005). Since the
Haggard/Noland report has been widely cited in the
press to highlight the issue of food and human
rights in North Korea, it will serve as a
touchstone for much of the following discussion.
The Human Rights Watch report, though more recent,
is not as comprehensive. [7] Human Rights
Watch, "A Matter of Survival: The North Korean
Government's Control of Food and the Risk of
Hunger" (New York: Human Rights Watch, May 2006).
[8] Given space limitations, this inquiry will
not evaluate a range of human-rights questions
associated with the food crisis such as the
situation of North Korean refugees in China and
elsewhere, the upsurge in human trafficking, the
tightening of restrictions on free speech, and
allegations of a rise in torture and public
executions. [9] Sang-Chul Suh, Growth and
Structural Changes in the Korean Economy,
1910-1940 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard
University Press, 1978), p 37. [10] On the
importance of Japanese agricultural manuals in
post-Korean War DPRK, see Balazs Szalontai, Kim
Il Sung in the Khrushchev Era (Stanford,
California: Stanford University Press, 2005), p
167. [11] Sanopi salaya nongopi sanda -
industry must live for agriculture to live - was
the expression in North Korea for the dependency
of farmers on industrial inputs of energy and
machinery. See L Gordon Flake and Scott Snyder,
Paved with Good Intentions (Westport,
Connecticut: Praeger, 2003). [12] Michael
Schloms, North Korea and the Timeless Dilemma
of Aid (Munster: Lit Verlag, 1994), p 97.
North Korea has 0.11 hectare per capita compared
with the United Kingdom's 0.12 and Israel's and
Vietnam's 0.10. Randall Ireson calculates this
ratio differently, arguing that North Korea has
only 0.06 hectare of land suitable for grain and
field crops per person. Even this more
conservative estimate, though, puts North Korea
slightly ahead of Japan and South Korea. Randall
Ireson, "Food Security in North Korea: Designing
Realistic Possibilities" (Stanford: Shorenstein
APARC, February 2006), p 8. [13] Robert
Burnett Hall, "Agricultural Region of Asia, Part
VII - the Japanese Empire", Economic Geography,
Vol 11, No 1, January 1935, p 51. [14] Wonhyuk
Lim, "North Korea's Food Crisis", Korea and World
Affairs, Winter 1997, p 577. [15] Tai Sung An,
North Korea: A Political Handbook
(Wilmington, Delaware: Scholarly Resources, Inc,
1983), p 129. [16] North Korea Business
Fact Book (Seoul: Korea Trade-Investment
Promotion Agency, 2001), p 37. [17] Ireson,
Food Security in North Korea. On the
soil-erosion issue, see also Meredith Woo-Cumings,
The Political Economy of Famine: The North
Korean Catastrophe and Its Lessons (Tokyo:
Asian Development Bank, January 2002). [18]
Human Rights Watch, "A Matter of Survival", p 8.
[19] Andrew Holloway, A Year in
Pyongyang, unpublished manuscript. [20]
Jae Kyu Park, North Korea in Transition and
Policy Choices: Domestic Structure and External
Relations (Seoul: Kyungnam University Press,
1999), pp 115, 118. According to Good Friends, the
markets returned to once every 10 days in 1992, as
the government sought to reassert control, only to
revert again to daily in 1993 ("Good Friends,
North Korean Human Rights and the Food Crisis", p
36). [21] Marina Ye Trigubenko, "Economic
Characteristics and Prospect for Development: With
Emphasis on Agriculture", in Han S Park ed,
North Korea: Ideology, Politics, Economy
(Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall,
1996), p 156. [22] Jae-Jean Suh, "North
Korea's Social System", in Tae Hwan Ok and Hong
Yung Lee, eds, Prospects for Change in North
Korea (Seoul: Research Institute for National
Unification, 1994), p 247. [23] Andrew
Natsios, The Great North Korean Famine
(Washington: US Institute for Peace, 2001), p 166.
[24] Marcus Noland argues that Pyongyang at
this time "did not act in the way of a responsible
government in the middle of a food crisis". There
is some truth to this assertion, though it does
not take into account the various departments of
the North Korean government and their differing
motivations. Interview with Marcus Noland,
February 13, 2006. [25] Andrea Savada, ed,
North Korea: A Country Study (Washington:
Library of Congress, 1994), p 139. [26]
Sung-wook Nam, "Feeding the People: Possible
Agricultural Normalization in North Korea", East
Asian Review, Vol 14, No 3, Autumn 2002, p 92.
[27] Lim, North Korea's Food Crisis, p
580. [28] Natsios, The Great North Korean
Famine, p 141. [29] John Feffer, Korean
Food, Korean Identity: The Impact of Globalization
on Korean Agriculture (Stanford: Shorenstein
APARC, February 2005). [30] Ireson, Food
Security in North Korea. [31] The Human
Rights Watch report also develops this theme:
"After a long period of unnecessary suffering, the
government of Kim Jong-il belatedly allowed the
limited opening of North Korea to foreign food aid
..." Human Rights Watch, "A Matter of Survival", p
1. [32] Ibid, p 27. [33] Interview with
aid worker, December 9, 2005; see also Schloms,
North Korea and the Timeless Dilemma of
Aid, p 155.
John Feffer is
the co-director of FPIF.
This series
of articles was produced under the auspices of a
research project sponsored by the Sejong
Institute. It will be published in book form this
year.
