Seoul
agonizes over feeding the
North By Sunny Lee
BEIJING - Things got Byzantine on Monday
as a former United States ambassador to South
Korea, Donald Gregg, jumped into the hot water of
a debate: whether the international community
should resume food aid to North Korea. He is for
it. South Korea is against it.
Writing in
The Korea Times, South Korea's oldest
English-language newspaper, Gregg eloquently
argued for the provision of food to North Korea,
backing his argument with conversations he had had
with individuals who had just returned from the
North on the severity of the food crisis. "I
devoutly hope ... Seoul and Washington can come
together in agreement on the need for humanitarian
food aid being rushed to North Korea," he
concluded.
The plea by the venerable
diplomat, who has had a 43-year career
with the US government and who
is the chairman emeritus of the Korea Society, an
organization of former American diplomats to South
Korea, came amid formidable pressure on South
Korea's Lee Myung-bak government, which has
adopted a hardline approach on North Korea. As if
nudged by Gregg's argument, the South Korean
government later on Monday approved private
shipments of food for North Korean children.
But it's too early to call it a major
shift in Seoul's policy toward North Korea. Seoul
demands North Korea first apologize for last
year's sinking of the corvette Cheonan and
the shelling of Yeonpyeong Island. Polls show
South Koreans support the government's stance. The
North's two provocations have aroused
unprecedented animosity among the people of South
Korea toward the North.
North Korea has
lately turned to the international community for
food assistance, citing a dire situation. For
example, Choe Tae-bok, chairman of the Supreme
People's Assembly of North Korea, said last week
in London that "the upcoming two months will be
the harshest time for North Koreans" in terms of
food availability.
The World Food Program
recently said that over 6 million North Koreans -
about a quarter of the reclusive nation's
population - would need 430,000 tonnes of food aid
to avoid starvation this year.
However,
South Korean government officials took a sharply
different stance, saying they couldn't accept the
assessment by the United Nations body. Hardliners
in South Korea suspect Pyongyang is exaggerating
its needs in a bid to ensure a stockpile of food
ahead of 2012, the year it has promised to emerge
as a "prosperous" country, in addition to being a
"powerful" country. They also suspect that
good-hearted UN inspectors were tricked by their
North Korean minders.
Food aid to North
Korea has frequently been a highly controversial,
if not divisive, matter. Pyongyang is accused of
diverting food for the military, while very little
is said to have ended up in the hands of those in
real need. Pyongyang is also blamed for not being
cooperative in allowing third-party monitoring
over how food is distributed.
At the heart
of the debate is whether the food situation in
North Korea is really dire enough to warrant
outside assistance based on humanitarian grounds,
despite North Korea's refusal to come to terms
with its past wrongdoings and pedal back on its
nuclear program.
Given the country's
opaqueness, it has been difficult to get a good
grip of North Korea's food crisis, including even
by those who regularly visit the country. "I've
got the rough feeling that the food situation in
North Korea over the last five years has
deteriorated. But then, I am still unsure about
how we can quantify, or qualify, it on numerical
terms," said Lee Dong-min, an official with South
Korean conglomerate Hyundai Asan, which runs the
inter-Korean industrial compound within the
North's city of Kaesong.
But Gregg, the
former US diplomat, believes he heard it from the
horse's mouth, as he wrote:
On February 28, I had participated
in an hour-long conference call with two
Americans, representatives of charitable
organizations with long records of giving food
aid to North Korea. Both men had been in three
northern provinces of North Korea conducting a
"food security assessment" between February 8
and 15, 2011, in what the North Koreans describe
as one of the coldest winters since 1945.
They were allowed to go wherever they
wanted, and were not restricted in any way. They
saw what they called "acute malnutrition" along
the Chinese border, with people already forced
to eat a mixture of grass and corn. In unheated
hospitals were new-born babies, unresponsive and
near death.
Daily food rations were
already being decreased, and local officials
said flatly that they would run out of food by
mid-June, as the acute cold has frozen 50 to 80%
of the winter wheat crop. This is a stark
reference to the traditional "spring hunger"
("bori gogae") scourge from which even
South Korea used to suffer.
Since the
mid-1960s, North Korea has not made public its
economic growth data. South Korea's central bank,
Bank of Korea, tries to estimate North Korea's
economic growth rate and said it had been negative
since 2006. But Jo Dong-ho, an expert on the North
Korean economy at Seoul's Ewha Womans University,
believes that it has been actually "slightly"
positive.
"The biggest reason is that
North Korea has this double-economy structure of
planned economy and market economy. Market
activities, notably since 2003, have been
expanding. In the past, people relied exclusively
on state distribution of food. But with the
expansion of the market, an increasing number of
people are making their livelihoods in the absence
of state distribution, which has been de facto
dysfunctional. I think the estimate by the Bank of
Korea didn't adequately reflect the role of the
market," Jo observed.
Nonetheless, Jo says
it is possible to draw different conclusions on
the state of North Korea's economy. "Although the
North Korean economy overall is making a positive
growth, the wealth gap among regions and social
classes is significantly worse than before. That
means your conclusion on the North Korean economic
situation can differ based on which side you look
at and emphasize more to promote your argument,"
said Jo.
Aid to North Korea had been
steadily decreasing since the right-wing Lee
Myung-bak government took power in 2008 and ground
to a complete halt last November when North Korea
shelled Yeonpyeong Island, killing South Korean
civilians for the first time since the Korean War
(1950-1953). The US also suspended sending food to
Pyongyang in 2009, shortly after Pyongyang
conducted a second nuclear test. So far,
Washington, Seoul's most important ally, has
allowed Seoul to set the tone on North Korea.
Some view the Lee government's withholding
of food aid to North Korea as not just aimed at
teaching Pyongyang the basic principle of
diplomacy 101 - reciprocity - but actually is a
thinly disguised push for regime change.
Lu Chao, director of the Korean Research
Center at the Liaoning Academy of Social Sciences,
located near the North Korean border, said, "A
lack of food in North Korea is an established
fact. North Korea's current situation very much
needs international aid." Yet Lu differed in
that he doesn't see the current situation as
severe enough to prompt major internal unrest in
the nation. "The North's economy is not as severe
as what is often reported in South Korean media.
The situation, for example, is better than the
'March of Ordeal' period in the 1990s," referring
to a time of severe food crisis in North Korea
during which anywhere from 1 million to 3 million
people reportedly died of hunger, depending on
different estimates.
Kim Young-hui, who
analyzes the North Korean economy with the state
think-tank, Korea Finance Corporation, sees a lack
of outside food aid as certainly posing a risk of
instability in North Korea over a period of time.
"North Korea's food problem actually started since
1993. It's been nearly 20 years. The more people
are hungry, the less they are loyal to the
leadership," she said.
Dong Yong-seung,
chief analyst on North Korea's economic security
at the Samsung Economic Research Institute in
Seoul, sees the UN assessment on the North Korean
food crisis as having failed to capture key
components of the current debate, such as why
North Korea is making an unusually vigorous
outreach to seek outside economic help. "North
Korea's economic problem wasn't born yesterday. It
has been there for many years, as the UN pointed
out.
"This year's food crisis in North
Korea has not yet deteriorated compared to
previous years. North Korea claimed it suffered
severe flood damage. But if you analyze satellite
pictures of the flood-stricken region, it wasn't
too bad. It was about the annual average. The key
here is to know why North Korea is making such an
unusual gesture of reaching out for food from the
outside world," Dong said.
Dong agrees
with Jo's view that the market is playing a
greater role in North Korea these days. "Poor
people early on turned to the underground market
because the state food distribution didn't reach
them anyway, especially outside Pyongyang. The
real problem now is that the privileged state
sector that used to receive stable state food
distribution is not receiving food anymore,
including the military, due to the discontinuation
of international food aid. That's the big hole.
The problem can be solved if they begin to receive
international food aid again. So, that's why they
are reaching out."
The Lee administration
is struggling to defend its apparent use of the
food crisis for political gain. David Alton, a
British parliamentarian, last week argued that
"food shouldn't be used as a weapon", urging South
Korea to listen to the counsel of the World Food
Program to resume food aid.
The Korea
Times, which supports engagement with North Korea,
wrote in an editorial, "Imagine a hunger-stricken
family in your neighborhood oppressed by a
violent, despotic patriarch. This villain often
threatens you and even hits you sometimes. Would
you let the poor children, the biggest victims,
starve to death for having a tyrant father, then?
Especially when they were once your family
members, who are currently alienated but should be
reunited in the end?"
A South Korean
economist who advises the Lee government on its
North Korean policy counters the view: "We are
willing to provide economic aid to starving people
in North Korea. But when you provide food, only
10% of it goes to the poor, and the rest, 90%,
goes to privileged groups such as the military.
This is the problem we all know," he said on
condition of anonymity.
Seoul remains
adamant in demanding the North first apologize for
the two provocations last year, and show sincerity
toward denuclearization, and importantly
demonstrate more transparency over how food aid is
distributed.
"How can we help North Korea
when it makes military provocations, engages in
constant threats, makes nuclear bombs, gives most
of the aid to the military, not civilians?" said
the scholar who advises the Lee government,
arguing that it is actually the North that is
making the situation difficult for its own people.
Kim of the Korea Finance Corporation sees
the two Koreas in a tight deadlock. "The Lee
government promised the bereaved family members of
the Cheonan victims that he won't change
his policy toward North Korea unless the North
apologizes first. If Lee withdraws that principle
and offers food aid to North Korea, that will
deliver a very wrong signal to North Korea, which
will see Lee is making that change because he
wants to build a political legacy of inter-Korean
tension thawing before his term ends soon. On
North Korea's part, it will never apologize for
the sinking of the Cheonan.
"Why?
Look what happened when North Korea apologized to
Japan over the past abduction of Japanese
citizens? The normalization negotiation underway
between Pyongyang and Tokyo got blown off. South
Korea demands the North's apology. But North Korea
thinks an apology will bring more harm than good.
They think confessing to the crime will put it
back on the list of countries sponsoring
terrorism. So it won't. It's a dead end."
Sunny Lee
(sleethenational@gmail.com) is a Seoul-born
columnist and journalist; he has degrees from the
US and China.
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