NORTH KOREA AND THE POLITICS OF FAMINE Part 2: Human rights violations
By John Feffer
(See
also
PART 1: Failure in the fields - click
here)
When Medecins Sans Frontieres withdrew from North Korea in 1998, the first
major humanitarian organization to do so, it raised many of the same concerns
that continue to echo today in reports on food and human rights: the misuse of
public funds for grand projects rather than food imports, the distribution of
food
according to political classification rather than need, the lack of monitoring,
and the diversion of aid away from the neediest. [34]
These are serious charges. But they are not new charges. In part, the human
rights versus humanitarian readings of the North Korean crisis derive from
different understandings of the origins of famine. One school looks at natural
causes - local weather patterns or climate trends such as El Nino. [35] Another
school focuses on economic issues, such as the impersonal play of the market
forces of supply and demand. A third school stresses politics.
As Lord Bauer sums up this last view, "The cause of famine, starvation, and
acute hunger is not overpopulation, or bad weather, or debt, but government
policies." Lord Bauer was not concerned here with the negligent policies of
powerful countries such as England (for instance, during the Irish famine) but
those of Third World governments, which he considered inefficient, incompetent,
or just plain venal. [36] Amartya Sen's assertion that democratic countries
don't suffer famines is a more current and diplomatic restatement of this
philosophy. [37]
According to the political school of analysis, North Korea, by rejecting
economic orthodoxy, political liberalization, and the stewardship of more
powerful countries, has not suffered the slings and arrows of external
misfortune but rather has brought the crisis upon itself. If Pyongyang had
responded to worsening circumstances with the right policies - importing more
food, distributing aid equitably, changing its budget priorities, and
instituting democratic reforms - famine would either have been averted or
quickly remedied.
The application of this political school of analysis to the case of North Korea
has entailed a shift from a policy frame to a rights frame. What had hitherto
amounted to criticism on the grounds of political failures has now been recast
as violations of human rights. We thus exit the realm of policy and enter the
realm of ethics, moving from political ineptitude to moral culpability, from
largely domestic problems to actionable offenses in the international arena.
Whether North Korea's domestic behavior after 1995 constitutes human rights
violations or is more prosaically the result of policy miscalculations depends
a great deal on how one approaches a set of terms: political classification,
diversion, monitoring, triage, and budget priorities.
Political classification
The information that North Korea divides its citizens into three major classes
and 51 subdivisions within those classes appeared in English for the first time
in the Human Rights Watch/Minnesota Lawyers International Human Rights
Committee 1988 report on the DPRK. [38] According to the CIA and South Korean
sources for this material, North Korean citizens are loyal, wavering, or
hostile toward the government, with the subdivisions related largely to family
history. These classifications affect employment, education, residence, and so
forth.
Although this class system had its origins in the immediate aftermath of the
North Korean revolution, it became official only in 1967. [39] This picture of
a society rigidly stratified according to political affiliation remains a
fixture in analysis of the DPRK. Haggard and Noland, for instance, argue that
this political stratification has meant that "deserving households - including
politically disfavored households - are not getting the food intended for them
or are being denied relief altogether". [40] Amnesty International (AI) draws a
correlation between political stratification on the one hand and proximity to
Pyongyang and political privilege on the other. [41]
There is no question that North Korea is a highly hierarchical society,
combining the traditional categories of Confucianism with the new classes
associated with communism. [42] But it is not clear whether the precise
stratification identified above still applies in today's North Korea or whether
it has had any influence over food distribution. It is quite likely that this
classification system has changed over time, particularly since the categories
often related to collaboration with Japanese colonial authorities, an event now
more than 60 years in the past.
"During the factionalist strife around the Korean War, the North Korean
authorities needed a system under which they could punish their enemies,"
economist Ruediger Frank explains, "but this system outlived its usefulness."
[43] Stratification, contends Erica Kang of Good Friends, still exists in the
DPRK but is comparable to class categories in England: "There's stigma attached
to it, but it doesn't buy you food." [44] Analyst Michael Schloms quotes
defectors who clarify that age and profession, not political loyalty,
determined the size of rations. [45] "The significance of the songbun system,"
writes Andrei Lankov, using the North Korean term for social hierarchy based on
origin, "has greatly diminished over recent years." [46]
By the 1980s, new systems of privilege were emerging in North Korea. Average
citizens, and not just highly placed party members, began to have access to
hard currency, to private agricultural plots, and to products available in
private markets. During the famine years, relations with friends or family over
the border in China became an important factor for survival. A classification
system built solely on one's grandparents' collaboration under colonialism - or
even on party membership - gave way to different, informal status categories.
Those who have profited under these new systems may well be those who parlayed
their political status for economic gain, like the "red capitalists" of the
East European and Soviet transitions. But those at the bottom of the hierarchy
also engage in risky behavior because they have nothing to lose. Thus it was
that ordinary women, generally a low-status group in North Korean society,
acquired real power in the household and in the community at large.
Scrounging small amounts of capital, these women became involved in
cross-border and domestic trade, peddled wild greens or homemade food, raised
domesticated animals, and sold produce from kitchen gardens. [47] Other
low-status groups such as Japanese-Koreans and citizens of Chinese ethnicity
also profited under the new dispensation. [48] A useful comparison could be
made to the reconfiguration of social status at the end of the Choson era, as
the sons of concubines, among other secondary-status groups, advanced
politically and economically under the new system of Japanese colonialism. [49]
Was food aid directed to the politically loyal? International aid agencies such
as Caritas provided food aid to orphanages, where it is unlikely that political
criteria played any part. The UN World Food Program distributed much of its
provisions through food-for-work programs that may have been subject to unseen
political screening, though this too is doubtful. Marcus Noland notes that the
WFP also provided food to institutions, and political considerations may well
have shaped decisions over how such provisions were distributed. [50] But such
decisions would have taken place at a local level rather than by central
directive, which blunts any charge of systematic human rights violations.
In both cases, however, the WFP's country director for North Korea, Richard
Ragan, insists there is no evidence of political considerations affecting
distribution. [51] The fact that targeted populations showed declining rates of
malnutrition, particularly between the nutrition surveys of 1998 and 2002,
provides some evidence for Ragan's assessment. [52]
Political considerations may even have inadvertently benefited those most in
need. As Erica Kang explains, some portion of food aid, which North Koreans
considered of the lowest quality, found its way to the political labor camps.
If anything, then, the perceived lower quality of the multilateral food
assistance (as distinct from bilateral rice aid from China or South Korea)
ensured that it went to the intended population. In other words, to the extent
that political classifications applied to multilateral food assistance, they
may well have benefited the neediest people, at least after the initial worst
period of the famine.
Diversion
Humanitarian relief organizations operate according to the principle of
proportionality: the greatest aid to the greatest need. Haggard and Noland
discuss the "diversion" of aid to "less deserving groups". [53] This
formulation raises two complex issues: the definition of diversion and the
definition of deserving.
During the Victorian era, there was much discussion of the "deserving poor:"
the virtuous poor who conform to majority values as compared to the poor deemed
to be lazy and shiftless. Such Victorianism distorts the debate on humanitarian
aid, for it encourages moral evaluations of who is and who is not properly
deserving of food.
Ethicist Peter Singer argues instead for effectiveness as a primary criterion:
preventing as many people as possible from starving to death. [54] "If the way
to do this is to aid those who are actually starving, then we should do so,"
Singer writes, "but if we can save more by employing other criteria as well,
that is what we must do." [55] Such a strategy might mean directing food to
farmers so they can grow more or to industrial workers so they can produce
goods that can be sold to import more food. Everyone is deserving of food -
that is, after all, the meaning of the right to food. But in a situation of
scarcity, governments and aid workers must come to agreement over strategic
allocations." Thus it is more useful to speak of "targeted" recipients rather
than "neediest" recipients.
The word "diversion" suggests a concerted effort to channel food away from the
targeted recipients. When the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Jean
Ziegler, asserted in 2001 that "most of the international aid was being
diverted", he based his charge largely on Action Contre La Faim documents that
do not speak of diversion but only point out that the most vulnerable
populations were not within the public structures of food distribution. [56]
Ziegler later qualified his statements after consulting with his UN colleagues
in the World Food Program, who discussed their efforts to improve monitoring
and access. [57] Ziegler might also profitably have consulted an
almost-identical back-and-forth between the US General Accounting Office (GAO)
and Representative Tony Hall over a 1999 GAO report that made similar charges
of diversion. [58]
Subsequent claims of as high as a 50% diversion rate were stated in the
Haggard/Noland report. [59] Good Friends, the source cited in the report,
quoted a figure of 30% of international food aid going to the military, 10%
allocated to workers in the munitions industry, and 10% to the staff of Kim
Il-sung holiday houses. On the surface, this adds up to 50%. However, it turns
out that Good Friends lumped all international assistance in this figure,
including Chinese bilateral aid that had no strings attached and cannot
therefore be considered diversion.
Furthermore, Good Friends was careful to note that its assessment was based on
a single eyewitness account. [60] Marcus Noland defends the diversion figure in
his report by attributing it not only to Good Friends but also to interviews
with a range of humanitarian organizations, some of which spoke of diversion,
others of loss, and others of certain "taxes" paid to officials. [61] Since
these additional sources remain confidential, it is difficult to assess them.
After noting that a 10% "spillage" rate is common in food aid deliveries around
the world, the WFP's Richard Ragan declares that, "We bring in non-preferred
commodities like corn and wheat, we process food at the factories, and we did
between 300 to 500 visits a month, so I'm pretty confident that our food, that
is, the WFP's food, largely went where it was targeted." [62]
Some foreign aid has indeed turned up in unexpected places. Haggard and Noland
cite a European NGO report of diversion of therapeutic milk. [63] Since the
aid, intended for certain provincial hospitals, ended up in provincial baby
homes, North Korean officials apparently interceded with their own ideas of the
appropriate targeted population. Though unwise, given the training needed to
dispense such milk, this example of redirecting aid is not comparable to, for
instance, the can of foreign food found on a North Korean submarine that ran
aground in South Korea. That was a clear example of diversion. Beyond these
cases, there are rumors of diversion and allegations from defectors, but the
meager evidence so far suggests that no significant or systematic diversion
took place.
Still, it is plausible that Pyongyang might allow international aid to reach
targeted populations so that it can then redirect to the military the domestic
production that would otherwise have fed civilians. Given the DPRK's
"military-first" policy, this kind of sleight of hand would not be surprising.
First of all, the government could argue that such a redirection is a national
security priority. Second, since the military has been the most effective work
force in the country, akin to the US Army Corp of Engineers, this practice
might qualify as a strategic allocation according to Singer's criterion of
effectiveness. Less justifiable, of course, would be reallocation if domestic
resources that had previously fed the general population were reallocated to
party cadres who already enjoyed a better diet.
But how well did the military and party cadres fare during the food crisis?
Even under the military-first policy, the North Korean military has suffered
severe shortages of food. [64] In fact, as the 2004 report from Good Friends
points out, hunger among the rank and file in the army presented a major social
problem: the plunder of civilian stocks. [65] In the army divisions that obtain
higher food rations, "The military supplies go into the society through several
routes," one defector has written. "Moreover, the military supplies disappear
because the officers save them for their families, and people who are in the
army try to save as much as they can while they are in the army." [66]
Party cadres, too, suffered during the famine. One high-level DPRK official
told former top North Korean government adviser Hwang Jong-yop before he
defected, that 10% of those who died of famine-related causes in 1996 were
cadre members, a figure that roughly matches the rate of party membership in
North Korean society. [67] This anecdotal evidence of hunger and malnutrition
among soldiers and cadre suggests a more egalitarian distribution of food than
alleged in human rights reports.
Perfect information about the food needs of a population, particularly one in a
crisis situation with a rather poor communications system, is impossible. "All
international humanitarian action is subject to some irremediable constraints,"
famine specialist Alex de Waal writes. [68] As Christopher Barrett and Daniel
Maxwell note, measurable need is only ever one of several criteria for
distribution, and food transfer is both difficult and time-consuming and
therefore subject to considerable "targeting errors". [69] They cite several
studies in the Horn of Africa demonstrating "that food aid flows as frequently
to the richest, most food-secure districts and households as it does to the
poorest, most food-insecure ones". [70]
Political considerations - social classifications, military-first designations,
or in capitalist countries, economic class strats - do not warp a perfect
humanitarian aid system. Each aid system has inherent structural limitations
that produce the abovementioned spillage rates. Targeting is not a hard
science. It must be negotiated within countries and between governments and aid
agencies. [71] Targeting is, in other words, a matter of contested sovereignty
- a power struggle over who makes the ultimate decisions regarding allocation
of resources.
Monitoring
Without careful monitoring, it is very difficult to determine whether food
reaches its intended population. Aid organizations and critics have complained
that DPRK authorities have placed numerous obstacles in the path of monitors.
Korean speakers have traditionally not been permitted on monitoring teams.
Random, unannounced inspections are not allowed. Certain provinces are
off-limits. These restrictions have given rise to the notion that North Korea
has something to hide.
Monitoring is not an on-off proposition. Rather, there is a spectrum of
coverage, and monitoring, like targeting, requires negotiation. Action Contre
la Faim left North Korea in 1999, complaining that the country only accepted
unconditioned aid. [72] But other organizations, including the UN World Food
Program, gradually negotiated better terms during the course of their stay in
the country, and managed to change the conditions under which their aid was
dispersed.
The WFP was only able to target its aid geographically beginning in 2001, [73]
but it eventually established five regional offices and considerably increased
the number of monitoring visits it conducted (before renegotiating a lower
level of aid and access in 2006). The South Korean NGO Good Friends developed a
direct relationship with authorities in the North Korean province of
Rajin-Sonbong and has reported an improvement in monitoring conditions. [74]
Canadian Foodgrains Bank (CFB) insists that the quality of monitoring in the
DPRK "exceed[ed] the average monitoring of CFB programs". [75]
But monitoring has become more than simply an index of the effectiveness of aid
distribution. For North Korean authorities, monitoring has represented a level
of invasiveness permitted to a certain extent with agencies trusted to a
certain degree, but the activity has always been unacceptable from a national
security point of view. For donor countries, monitoring has come to be seen as
an indicator of whether North Korea was willing to play by international rules
of conduct. This politicization of aid - in which monitoring is perceived as
more than an instrument of judging effectiveness - has transformed negotiations
between international agencies and North Korean officials into a power struggle
over, ultimately, sovereignty.
Food crisis situations elsewhere in the world haven't received comparable
scrutiny. As one aid worker who has worked extensively in North Korea quips, in
referring to food aid delivered to Afghanistan after the toppling of the
Taliban, "How is food aid monitored when it is thrown out of an airplane?" [76]
In situations where sovereignty struggles are not germane - Afghan sovereignty
had been all but abrogated - monitoring is a political non-issue, even though
questions of targeting and effectiveness remain.
Currently the debate over monitoring has shifted to whether the Republic of
Korea (ROK) can require the same level of transparency for its bilateral aid
that the WFP achieved in its multilateral assistance. Seoul argues that, like
the WFP, it has improved its monitoring activities over the years as a function
of building trust and relationships. [77] It is also interesting to note that
NGOs initially criticized the WFP for setting a low monitoring standard. [78]
Now it is the WFP that is held up as the benchmark by which all other
monitoring should be judged. We'll return to this question of South Korean
assistance in the section on policy implications.
Triage
The largest number of North Korean food migrants and refugees in China come
from the DPRK's northeast provinces. Interviews with these refugees suggest
that the famine hit this region hardest. Nutritional surveys also indicate that
malnutrition varies significantly by province, with children in North and South
Hamgyong and Ryanggang provinces worst affected. [79] That food monitors were
not allowed into certain areas of North Korea prompted speculation that
officials deliberately cordoned off certain parts of the country in order to
save other ones. Andrew Natsios wrote in 1999 that Pyongyang had triaged the
Northeast. According to Fiona Terry of Medicins Sans Frontieres, in a 2001
Guardian article, Kim Jong-il asserted in a 1996 speech that only 30% of the
population needed to survive in order to rebuild North Korean society.
North Korea's northeast provinces have traditionally been food-deficit regions
that relied on transfers of food from the South. When the famine hit, the
government began to apply the self-reliance doctrine of juche at the provincial
level. Since the center no longer had surplus food to distribute, each province
was on its own. Individual counties negotiated contracts directly with Chinese
authorities across the border; entire factories, reduced to scrap, were traded
for food.
The question from a human rights perspective is whether Pyongyang exacerbated
this situation. The northeast provinces are home to economically important
industries (mining) and have been political strongholds for the Workers Party.
[80] On the face of it, then, it wouldn't make sense for Pyongyang to
deliberately starve a politically and economically important part of the
country. The situation does not appear comparable to Moscow's approach to the
Ukraine in the 1930s or Addis Ababa's posture toward Tigray province in the
1980s. Although the northeast provincial capital of Chongjin was the site of a
possible military coup in 1995, there is no evidence that this city was a
bastion of political opposition. [81]
Yet DPRK authorities resisted initial requests from international relief
organizations to provide assistance to the Northeast. World Food Program aid
reached the East Coast only in 1997 and 1998, and only one-fifth of the WFP's
total aid went to feed the third of North Korea's population that lived in this
area. [82] Though Pyongyang later agreed to an expansion of the WFP program in
the Northeast, it is difficult to explain the two-year lag in response to
conditions there. [83] Political scientist Wonhyuk Lim speculates that the
central government was reluctant to show the worst of the crisis to foreigners.
[84] He points out, though, that food aid did make it to the Northeast in 1995,
when South Korea shipped provisions to Chongjin, a primary port in that area.
[85]
Meanwhile, food monitors were barred from 45 of 303 DPRK counties in March
2005. Aid workers offer various explanations, including potential military
sensitivity or the location of prison camps in those counties. Disputing the
notion of any area being cordoned off, Good Friends staff person Erica Kang
counters that even the labor camps, which have the highest concentration of the
politically suspect, received foreign aid because this food was considered to
be of the worst quality. [86]
Pyongyang's greatest policy error at this time was its attempt to uphold laws
restricting freedom of movement. Travel restrictions made it difficult for the
population in the Northeast to move around legally to obtain food. [87]
Ultimately, however, the formal travel pass system began to lose its hold, and
even cross-border movement became more feasible, though not without hardships
or grave dangers. Meanwhile, though, the application of juche on a
county level may have been a sensible accommodation to reality, this provincial
extension put the northeast in very difficult straits.
Beyond a doubt, the DPRK's food crisis hit hardest in the northeast. Although
there is no solid evidence that Pyongyang deliberately cut off this province,
distribution of food was a significant problem. In retrospect, given what we
know of the consequences of the famine in the northeast, Pyongyang should have
directed more food aid there between 1995 and 1997, particularly in the period
when South Korean aid dwindled and international aid had yet to begin. It would
be a mistake, though, to argue that the central government was either unaware
of the regional problem or did nothing to rectify it. Pyongyang's major failing
seems to relate more to the overall amount of available food than to its
distribution. So now we must turn to the government's budget priorities.
Budget priorities
During the famine period, North Korea continued to spend large amounts of money
on its military and on projects extolling its past and current leadership. This
approach to budget allocations might be considered a human rights violation,
since it deliberately deprives the population of its right to food. Such
political decisions have indeed been appalling. Unfortunately, North Korea is
not alone in this regard.
Not only do many countries in the world spend money on the military when
portions of their population are malnourished, but the global order itself
tilts in favor of military purchases rather than food distribution to the poor.
In most free trade agreements a national security exception exempts military
budget decisions, such as direct subsidies of contractors, from trade
liberalization - which suggests that the sovereign right to exclusive control
over military spending remains strong even when global institutions and
treaties have trumped sovereign control over other budgetary matters. [88]
Still, despite the generally poor track record on budgetary priorities around
the globe, international agencies, NGOs, scholars, and activists have
increasingly come to view development as a human right and to see political and
civic freedoms as important to securing economic improvement. [89] The lack of
opportunity for groups within North Korea to voice their dissatisfaction -
about economic priorities or the distribution of economic goods - is a
significant concern. That this problem exists to a greater or less extent in
other societies, including democratic ones, does not let North Korea off the
hook.
So, did Pyongyang's budgetary decisions exacerbate the famine? Though North
Korea did increase its commercial imports of food as its agricultural situation
deteriorated in the late 1980s, the levels declined in the mid-1990s (along
with all imports) and sagged again from 1998 on. Was this part of a plan to
deliberately starve the population? Wonhyuk Lim rebuts any such claim. With
more food aid finally entering the country in the late 1990s, the government
decided that it did not need to import a surplus. "One may suggest that the
planners should have allowed a bigger margin of error before reducing
commercial imports to prepare for unexpected changes in domestic production or
food aid," he writes, "but it would be a stretch to argue that the planners
reduced commercial imports with intent to leave the population vulnerable to
starvation. Western donor countries have significantly reduced their food aid
to North Korea since 2001, but scholars don't assign such a sinister motive to
these reductions." [90]
The DPRK's food crisis took place during a period of general economic collapse.
The country's leadership also perceived that it remained within a generally
hostile international environment that required continued military
expenditures. The loss of the country's first and only leader in 1994 also
generated what might be considered a legitimation crisis, and the ruling elite
became more anxious about maintaining power. With budgetary resources
declining, it had to make strategic allocations, and it invoked its sovereign
right to do so.
The decision to rely on international food aid, although directly threatening
to the governing ideology, begins to make sense in the context of an overall
budgetary crisis. Since a hungry population and a malnourished military do not
make for a stronger security policy or a heightened sense of government
stability, the decision not to import more food in the mid-1990s would appear
to be a miscalculation rather than a deliberate or callous attempt to starve
the population.
North Korea's decision in 2005 to phase out humanitarian food shipments has
been highlighted as another example of government policy that deliberately puts
the population at risk. [91] But Pyongyang, recognizing how ill-advised
dependency on food aid is, has long called for a shift from aid to development.
Rather than a function of inept agricultural policy or a criminal disregard for
still-vulnerable populations, the government's decision seems based on a
longer-term assessment of the requirements of the economy.
Whether Pyongyang is in error depends in part on calculations of grain
shortfall. According to conventional estimates, the DPRK needs approximately
6.5 million tons of food annually to feed its population. Its best harvest
recently was in 2005, when it produced 4.8 million tons. Its shortfall,
therefore, was approximately 1.7 million tons, which it has to make up in aid
or trade. Ruediger Frank, however, calculates a lower overall requirement of
less than 5 million tons. [92] If North Korea maintains its 2005 yields, the
government faces virtually no shortfall at this lower figure. From his
estimates, Frank believes that Pyongyang's decision to phase out humanitarian
aid shipments is rational rather than irrational.
If, however, reports of the 2005 harvest are considerably inflated - if, for
instance, the production level was more like 3 to 3.5 million tons [93] - then
aid from China and South Korea will not entirely fill the gap, and hunger will
worsen in 2006. The DPRK has negotiated a two-year program of development
assistance with the World Food Program that would provide aid for nearly 2
million children and women of childbearing age in the industrial East and
mountainous North, but this too would be insufficient if overall grain
calculations are unwarrantedly optimistic. [94]
The 2006 floods further complicate the situation. The extent of the damage
remains unclear. The North Korean government claims "hundreds" dead, while the
South Korean NGO Good Friends estimates over 50,000 dead or missing. [95] The
loss of arable land, according to the World Food Program, suggests a decline of
as much as 100,000 tons of food from the expected harvest. [96] The
significance of this shortfall depends on the level of bilateral assistance.
Seoul has reversed its initial suspension of humanitarian aid after North
Korea's July missile launches, and South Korea's Red Cross has offered 100,000
tons. [97] If Seoul resumed sending its annual contribution of 500,000 tons of
rice, the shortfall would be covered. Much also depends on China, for this
erstwhile ally has reduced its oil shipments in the aftermath of North Korea's
missile launches in July 2006. For its part, Pyongyang was initially reluctant
to invite international assistance back into the country (over and above the
negotiated World Food Program amounts) but has more recently shown greater
receptivity.
Some critics have charged the WFP with subsidizing the DPRK's military program
by supplying assistance to populations that the government should responsibly
use its budget to feed. [98] The truth is, however, that humanitarian
organizations find themselves in this position virtually everywhere in the
world - including rich countries such as the United States - because government
budget priorities are set according to political considerations not
humanitarian ones. The problem in North Korea is that those who suffer because
of a humanitarian crisis have no political voice and have little hope of
affecting official policy except indirectly in the government's calculations of
its overall stability.
Thus we have two separate but related divergences on the issue of sovereignty.
In the first divergence, North Korea has asserted its right to determine policy
within its territory and has been loath to accept the demands of other
governments or NGOs concerning the production, distribution, and accountability
of its food system. In the second divergence, North Korea adheres to a notion
of state sovereignty in which power is invested in the institutions of
government; many other countries believe to one degree or another in popular
sovereignty, in which power is invested in the people. In other words,
Pyongyang clings to an older, Westphalian model in an age of globalization and
democracy. The question remains whether any of this will change as a result of
ongoing reforms within North Korea.
Notes
[34] Fiona Terry, "Feeding the Dictator," The Guardian, August 6, 2001.
[35] Woo-Cumings, The Political Economy of Famine; Mike Davis, Late Victorian
Holocausts (London: Verso, 2001).
[36] Stephen Devereux, Theories of Famine (New York: Harvester
Wheatsheaf, 1993), page 6.
[37] Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Anchor, 2000).
[38] Minnesota Lawyers International Human Rights Committee and Human Rights
Watch/Asia, Human Rights in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North
Korea), December 1988. Marcus Noland points out that Helen-Louise Hunter
described the classification system in her study of North Korea for the CIA in
the early 1980s, but this material was only published in 1999 when her book Kim
Il-sung's North Korea appeared from Praeger. Interview with Marcus Noland,
February 13, 2006.
[39] Good Friends, North Korean Human Rights and the Food Crisis, page
41.
[40] Haggard and Noland, Hunger and Human Rights, page 23.
[41] According to AI's Rajiv Narayan, "The higher the strata of the person, the
greater the possibility of the person being in Pyongyang or in areas of
political power. This also meant better jobs for the party members and their
families; and hence better privileges. This conclusion was corroborated by the
testimonies we had collected." He notes, however, that "there was not much
reportage of the influence of the markets in North Korea around the time of the
launch of the AI report to support the conclusion (that access of market
matters)." Email correspondence with Rajiv Narayan, May 2, 2006.
[42] Charles Armstrong, The North Korean Revolution, 1945-1950 (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 2004); Michael Voslensky, Nomenklatura: The
Soviet Ruling Class (New York: Doubleday, 1984).
[43] Interview with Ruediger Frank, December 4, 2005.
[44] Interview with Erica Kang, December 6, 2005. [45] Schloms, North Korea and
the Timeless Dilemma of Aid, page 111.
[46] Andrei Lankov, "The Natural Death of North Korean Stalinism," Asia Policy,
January 2006, page 116.
[47] Soon-Hee Lim, "The Food Crisis and Women's Lives in North Korea,"
Presentation at the 2005 international seminar on North Korean human rights,
Seoul, South Korea, November 3, 2005.
[48] Lankov, "The Natural Death of North Korean Stalinism," pages 116-7.
[49] Kyung Moon Hwang, Beyond Birth: Social Status in the Emergence of Modern
Korea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2004).
[50] Interview with Marcus Noland, February 13, 2006.
[51] Email correspondence with Richard Ragan, March 20, 2006.
[52] UNICEF, "DPR Korea: Nutrition Assessment 2002," February 20, 2003.
[53] Haggard and Noland, Hunger and Human Rights, page 12.
[54] Peter Singer, "Reconsidering the Famine Relief Argument," in Vernon
Ruttan, ed, Why Food Aid? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1993), page 78.
[55] It is important to note here that Haggard and Noland also echo this notion
of effectiveness as a criterion. Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland, "Noland and
Haggard Defend Food Aid Report," CanKor, September 8, 2005.
[56] Schloms, North Korea and the Timeless Dilemma of Aid, page 176.
[57] Ziegler, "Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights."
[58] Karin Lee and Adam Miles, "North Korea on Capitol Hill," in John Feffer,
ed, The Future of US-Korean Relations (New York: Routledge, 2006).
[59] Haggard and Noland, Hunger and Human Rights, page 27.
>
[60] Interview with Erica Kang, December 6, 2005.
[61] Interview with Marcus Noland, February 13, 2006.
[62] Email correspondence with Richard Ragan, March 20, 2006.
[63] Haggard and Noland, Hunger and Human Rights, page 26.
[64] Good Friends, North Korean Human Rights and the Food Crisis, pages
60-1; Hazel Smith, Hungry for Peace (Washington: US Institute of Peace,
2005), pages 87-8; Human Rights Watch, A Matter of Survival, page 11. [65] Good
Friends, North Korean Human Rights and the Food Crisis, page 61.
[66] Sung Min Kim, "Painful Life of People's Army," Presentation at Seoul
Summit: Human Rights in North Korea, Seoul, South Korea, December 2005, page
154.
[67] Andrew Natsios, The Politics of Famine in North Korea (Washington,
DC: US Institute of Peace, 1999).
[68] Alex de Waal, Famine Crimes (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1997), page 138.
[69] Christopher Barrett and Daniel Maxwell, Food Aid After Fifty Years (London:
Routledge, 2005), pages 141, 142.
[70] Ibid, page 142.
[71] Moreover, as Alex de Waal argues, all international aid tends to increase
the central power of government and create opportunities for corruption (De
Waal, Famine Crimes, page 136) . Though difficult or impossible to
measure, the level of corruption in North Korea rose in the late 1990s but did
not approach the levels seen in other food crises, such as the 50% unaccounted
losses in Somalia in 1991-1992 (De Waal, page 168) .
[72] Christophe Reltien, Humanitarian Action in North Korea: Ostrich Politics,"
in The Geopolitics of Hunger, 2000-2001: Hunger and Power (Boulder, CO:
Lynne Rienner, 2001), page 163.
[73] Schloms, North Korea and the Timeless Dilemma of Aid, page 168.
[74] Interview with Erica Kang, December 6, 2005.
[75] Smith, Hungry for Peace, page 127.
[76] Interview with aid worker, December 9, 2005.
[77] ROK Ministry of Unification, Public Relations Policy Support, "ROK Refutes
Report on Lack of Food Aid Transparency," September 2, 2005.
[78] Schloms, North Korea and the Timeless Dilemma of Aid, page 233.
[79] South Hamgyong and Ryanggang registered very high levels of stunting;
South Hamgyong, North Hamgyong, and Ryanggang had the highest prevalence of
underweight children; South and North Hamgyong exhibited high levels of
wasting. Central Bureau of Statistics, Institute of Child Nutrition DPRK, "DRPK
2004 Nutrition Assessment Report of Survey Results," NAPSNET, October 27, 2005.
[80] Smith, Hungry for Peace, pages 50-1.
[81] Barbara Demick, "Trading Ideals for Sustenance," Los Angeles Times, July
4, 2005.
[82] Schloms, North Korea and the Timeless Dilemma of Aid, page 168.
[83] According to a World Food Program report from 1997: "An American ship, the
bulk carrier M/V Judy Litrico, arrived at Nampo near Pyongyang on 29 June.
While most of the cargo of 24,953 metric tons of cereals is being off-loaded at
Nampo, 8,000 metric tons is destined for Chongjin for July distributions in the
northeast part of the country. The shipment will be the first food aid
delivered directly to the northeast where aid agencies have not previously been
able to operate." In that year, too, according to the WFP report, "DPR Korean
authorities have given WFP permission to open a sub-office in the northeastern
port city of Chongjin, and have approved additional sub-offices in Hamhung in
the east, and in Sinuiju in the northwest near the Chinese border." World Food
Program Emergency Report, July 4, 1997.
[84] Interview with Wonhyuk Lim, March 10, 2006.
[85] Email communication with Wonhyuk Lim, March 13, 2006; he supplied
clippings from the South Korean press that catalog the shipments to Chongjin
from June to August 1995.
[86] Interview with Erica Kang, December 7, 2005.
[87] Good Friends, North Korean Human Rights and the Food Crisis, pages
28-33; Amnesty International, Starved of Rights, Section 5.2.
[88] John Feffer, "Globalization and Militarization," Foreign Policy In Focus,
February 2002.
[89] United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report 2000: Human
Rights and Human Development, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
[90] Wonhyuk Lim, "Challenging Assumptions about Food Aid for North Korea,"
Dynamic Korea, February 13, 2006.
[91] Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland, "A U-Turn on Reforms Could Starve North
Korea," International Herald Tribune, December 22, 2005.
[92] Ruediger Frank, "Economic Reforms in North Korea (1998-2004)," Journal of
the Asia Pacific Economy, vol 10, no 3, August 2005, page 283. Frank estimates
a requirement of about 4.3 million tons of rice to meet 75% of the caloric
needs of the population. This figure excludes seed requirements and loss due to
storage and transportation, which would push the figure closer to 5 million
tons. Frank also notes that if the population doesn't rely as heavily on grain
for its calories, the figure goes back down to around 4.5 million tons. Email
communication with Ruediger Frank, May 2, 2006.
[93] Good Friends, North Korea Today, Issue 12, 2006, page 3.
[94] "Food Aid for North Korea," The New York Times, May 11, 2006. [95] Choe
Sang-hun, "Charity Sees Much Higher Toll from Huge North Korean Floods," The
New York Times, August 16, 2006.
[96] Associated Press, "UN Says North Korean Crop Loss Heavy," July 24, 2006.
[97] Reuters, "S Korea Red Cross Plans Rice Aid for North," August 15, 2006.
[98] Claudia Rosett, "Food for Nukes?" Wall Street Journal, February 18, 2006.
Part Three: Reform
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.
