Asia Times: PYONGYANG WATCH


	August 22, 2001	atimes.com

The Koreas

PYONGYANG WATCH
Food for thought: Should North Korea get aid?
By Aidan Foster-Carter

Here's food for thought. Two questions for lovers of trivia and parlor games. Which country receives the UN World Food Program's (WFP) biggest aid package, anywhere, ever? Surely some woe-begotten land in Africa? Wrong. It's North Korea, home of the juche (self-reliance) theory. Emphasis on the theory.

Better yet. Which Asian country gets the most US food aid? Surely a Washington ally, such as Pakistan - or maybe India these days. Wrong again. Yup, it's public enemy No 1 and rogue state par excellence, the DPRK. What's more, this is one area where President George W Bush has continued Bill Clinton's policy without a break.

These two freaky facts are really one, in that the US has been a major donor to the WFP's efforts in North Korea. But the irony persists - as does the DPRK's food deficit, suggesting that the many aid agencies which have set up shop in Pyongyang over the past six years won't be leaving any time soon.

Unless in disgust, that is. As mentioned in an earlier column, 'Life-worlds' and death: aid agencies and North Korea , Oxfam and Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) are among several non-governmental organizations (NGOs) which have pulled out of North Korea. For MSF, this goes beyond complaints at restrictions on their work to a conviction that the DPRK state is itself the problem - a view forcefully argued by Fiona Terry, a leading light in MSF in Australia, in an article in the London Guardian on August 6. Headed "Feeding the dictator" it states squarely that "Food aid to North Korea only props up Kim Jong-il's grotesque regime. It should be stopped."

Ms Terry makes a strong case. The DPRK's recent purchase of US$500 million of Russian weaponry illustrates its preference for guns over butter, as the old saying goes. She queries too whether the nearly 1 million tons of food aid each year from the WFP and other donors is actually reaching the targeted 8 million most vulnerable North Koreans - children, pregnant and breast-feeding mothers, the sick and the old - citing claims by refugees that they never saw any of this aid, or had evidence that it was diverted to the army.

Although much discussed, the diversion issue seems to me a red herring. Whether or not WFP grain is directly misappropriated by the army, the fact is that any and all food aid by definition frees up other resources from less squeamish donors (notably China), or bought as imports or indeed home-grown, to be channeled to whatever groups the government favors. That is simply an occupational hazard of aid. (If it bothers you, do what I do and support medical aid, which unlike food is not at risk of diversion.)

Fiona Terry rightly notes that the DPRK classifies its people by their perceived loyalty and/or utility to the regime - although her claim that in 1996 Kim Jong-il said only 30 percent need to survive is news to me. Especially striking is her charge that Pyongyang goes to extremes of fabricating what it wants visitors to see: hungry or well-fed children according to taste, or even worsening flood damage to get more aid.

As regular readers know, I'm all for calling Kim Jong-il to account for his sins, and for calling a spade a spade. Like Ms Terry, I deplore the conspiracy of silence by UN agencies and (nowadays, ironically) the South Korean government, who like the three monkeys of fable refuse to see, hear or speak evil of this awful regime. That's unkind; Seoul and the WHP will retort that they try to exert pressure behind the scenes, and I understand why they have to be diplomatic. But the rest of us can and should speak out.

Speak out - but not get out. Pace Fiona Terry, that conclusion doesn't follow. True, food aid sustains the foul regime whose perverse priorities and pig-headed policies created the famine in the first place. But without aid, even more ordinary North Koreans would have died than have. Ms Terry admits that death rates have fallen. Harvests have hardly improved, so it's foreign aid that's made the difference.

Emphasis on the foreign. Fiona Terry says she favors engagement as "the only real means to influence the regime", yet deplores food aid being part of this. But why? Since 1995, North Koreans have learned (the hard way) two crucial truths: that their own vainglorious rulers can't or won't feed them, whereas the foreigners demonized in Pyongyang's puerile propaganda can and will. That's a powerful lesson.

Ms Terry also notes that food aid is part of "a 'soft-landing' policy aimed at avoiding an implosion of the regime which could trigger military action or refugee flows". Quite so, but what's wrong with that? Bad is bad, but it's better than worse. Half a century ago, the Korean peninsula had war and refugees aplenty. A good deal of moral hazard - intrinsic in aiding Kim Jong-il - is better than the vast politico-social risks and huge economic costs of a DPRK collapse. And anything, but anything, is preferable to the ultimate nightmare of a second Korean War. This seems to me not evil realpolitik, but responsible statesmanship. MSF quit, but most NGOs have decided to stay on and fight. Moral grandstanding is the easy way out. I say: Grit your teeth, hold your nose, and hang on in there. But do tell it like it is.

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