Asia Times: PYONGYANG WATCH: A permanent charity case?



	November 24, 1999	atimes.com

The Koreas

PYONGYANG WATCH: A permanent charity case?
By Bradley Martin

Recent news items on the North Korean famine have presented a mixed - indeed, downright confusing - picture. Are things getting better? Or not? Finding an answer requires some sifting and sorting.

A Korea Herald story this week quotes a United Nations report as saying the food situation has improved after bottoming out in 1996-97. But the report from the UN's Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Geneva adds that ''food shortages still persist among the general population. The present situation is fragile and any reduction in aid would have serious consequences.'' OK, aid shouldn't be reduced. But why does the story also say that the UN aid budget for the country next year - far from shrinking - will rise by 13.5 percent to $331.7 million? No explanation in that story.

An earlier Korea Herald story, from last Friday, quotes North Korea's vice agriculture minister as saying his country produced 4.28 million tons of food grains this year, a 40 percent increase over last year's harvest. This, says the paper, is a record high for the period of 1995 and after.

There are further encouraging assessments to be found in recent reports. But read all the way through enough of them and it appears unlikely that the country and its leaders are addressing in a sufficiently serious way the underlying problems that led to the famine. As a South Korean government research report, quoted in a Yonhap story at the end of October, put it, ''the North's food shortage will continue for quite a while, as Pyongyang has shown little will to reform the agricultural industry''.

Take deforestation of hillsides. The late Great Leader Kim Il-sung urged his people to tame the hillsides for growing food - and they followed his instruction with such a vengeance that hills were eventually stripped of trees. Of course that led to massive erosion. And. predictably. that led to the silting up of streams and thence to disastrous floods, over a period of several years, that washed away topsoil and left rocky, infertile land in the place of much of the North's former rice bowl. This has cut drastically into the country's supply of arable land.

There's talk now of doing something about the tree situation. According to a JoongAng Ilbo report early this month, current Great Leader Kim Jong-il is tying up with a unit of the United Nations Development Program to replant. But it seems it would take some very serious planting indeed to catch up with the rate of deforestation. Another JoongAng Ilbo story a couple of days later said North Korea had increased timber exports 28-fold between 1990 and 1998, to a total of 4 million tons. Most of it went to China to earn hard currency, the paper said, quoting the South Korean Ministry of Unification.

Those exported logs are in addition to the trees cut and used for home cooking and heating - used so out of necessity, at a time of fossil-fuel shortages - caused by lack of cash - and the resulting near-paralysis of transportation. Meanwhile, a mid-November Agence France Presse dispatch from Tokyo quoted a UN World Food Program official as saying North Koreans are continuing to farm ever steeper hillsides ''where the topsoil is thin and erosion is vicious, especially in heavy rains''.

Against the further disasters that can be forecast as a result, it is not terribly reassuring that the same official cites ''some positive factors which are helping to change the situation, although very slowly''. These include the regime's attempts to rehabilitate land already damaged by floods, encouragement of kitchen gardens and some UN-inspired double-cropping.

Aid organizations argue that the country's food problems for the foreseeable future are simply beyond its ability to cope without international assistance. Farmers who are themselves malnourished can hardly keep up with the work required to keep North Korea's labor-intensive agricultural system going, a UN Food and Agriculture Organization economist is quoted as saying in a Korea Times article this month. The article cites a joint FAO-WFP report saying that because of its weakened population, the ongoing ill-effects of flooding and other disasters and the country's isolation from the global economy, North Korea will remain dependent on aid until major changes are made.

One change that is coming, the UN food agencies said, is the easing of economic sanctions on North Korea by the US and its allies. This will have ''a significant and positive impact on sustainable food security''. But the much bigger change that virtually no-one thinks is coming is for Kim Jong-il and company to shift available resources away from military spending and the erection of monuments to glorify the leaders - from efforts to preserve the regime and insure the survival and comfort of its elite members, that is - to something that benefits ordinary citizens.

(Special to Asia Times Online)

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