Asia Times: How hungry is North Korea?


	October 23, 2001	atimes.com

The Koreas

PYONGYANG WATCH
How hungry is North Korea?
By Aidan Foster-Carter

Autumn. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, as the poet John Keats described it. More importantly, for those closer to the land who lack the leisure to wax poetical, the season of harvest. And with it, the all important question: Will there be enough, to last through the depths of winter until the coming of spring?

South Korea today is rich enough, and as urban and high-tech as it gets. Yet anyone over 50 who grew up in the countryside - as most did, in those days - remembers "spring hunger": The lean weeks when the previous year's harvest is all gone, and before spring or summer crops are ready. Hence when famine struck North Korea in the years after 1995, many in the South not only sympathized: they could empathize.

Are things getting any better on the food front for the DPRK? It all depends on who you read. This summer, certainly, had its share of extreme weather, for the eighth successive year. The coldest winter in decades was followed by a long, crippling drought - only to be broken by torrential rain which led to widespread flooding. First too little, then too much water was a double blow for crops and rural infrastructure alike.

As recently as October 9-10, the east coast port of Wonsan was pummeled by 30 hours of gales and rain. The North Korean media, usually so shy of anything resembling a number, make an exception for disasters. According to the Korean Central News Agency, the DPRK's official news agency, 411 millimeters of rain fell on Wonsan, including 114 millimeters in just two hours. Total precipitation was 15 times the norm for the first 10 days of October in the past 60 years. They even tell us how deep the mud was: 30-50 centimeters, left after the city was under 1-1.5 meters of water.

Poor Wonsan. Every sector was hit. "Tens of thousands of families" lost their homes; store goods were washed away or ruined; ships and their cargoes were sunk or damaged; "hundreds of industrial buildings were left submerged to make thousands of machines hardly operational". On nearby farms gathering the harvest, "sheaves of rice were washed away from thousands of hectares of paddy fields". Roads, bridges, and electric power were knocked out. Later reports put the death toll at 114, and rice lost at 73,000 tons. Wonsan's sewage system broke down and the main hospital lost power for two days. And this in a food deficit area, where soon temperatures will fall below freezing as the unforgiving Korean winter sets in.

All dismal news for this year's crop, you'd think. That seems to be the general view - or perhaps just what we've come to expect, after so many bad years. A Kyodo correspondent recently in North Korea called this year's spring drought the worst for 1,000 years (do records really go back that far?). Cha Du-hyok, manager of the Takan cooperative farm 12 kilometers north of Pyongyang, told Kyodo that rice seedlings had had to be replanted three times, as they withered each time. The farm only completed planting one-third of its paddies. It also sowed corn (maize) and millet on odd patches of land - but the corn was blighted.

More generally, Cha was quoted as saying that "rice output is on the decline: There were seven to eight tons of rice per hectare of paddies 10 years ago, [but] production was down to one to two tons in recent years," - or even as low as half a ton. Such rare frankness confirms that North Korea's farm blues began well before 1995, so it can't all be blamed on cruel nature. Cha in effect admits to wider woes, describing a no-win situation, "We need pumps to get water, but the pumps need electricity and we don't have electric power."

The doom and gloom view is also endorsed by the United Nation's World Food Program (WFP). Since 1995, the WFP has run what has become its biggest operation anywhere in the world, feeding 7.6 million people in the DPRK - about a third of the population. In August, WFP executive director Catherine Bertini warned that so endemic is the food crisis that North Korea will depend on aid for years to come - even in good weather. WFP field reports in July and August estimated early crops - wheat, barley, potato - at 35-80 percent lower this year than last. The overall harvest in the 12 months through October is reckoned to be down 14 percent, from 2.92 million to 2.57 million tons. On that basis, WFP forecast a food deficit of 564,000 tons for the rest of this year, and predicted a further cut in state rations from an already paltry 215 grams per day to a derisory 150 grams.

Yet here's an odd thing. Weather being no respecter of man-made borders, South Korea too experienced the drought and flood double whammy this year. But far from ruining the crop, Seoul faces a record rice harvest of 5.5 million tons: its best since 1990. Sunshine since July did the trick. What's more, visitors to the North say it's the same there. "Rice harvests are excellent," said Kim Sun-kwon of Kyongbuk University, after a two-week trip to 12 farming areas in seven provinces in September.

Known locally as Dr Corn for his pioneering work on maize seeds, originally in Africa, Professor Kim now breeds new hybrid varieties for North Korea, which he has visited over 20 times. Another South expert on the same trip - Kim Un-geun, director of the North Korean Agriculture Research Center at the ROK's Korea Rural Economic Institute - reckons that the total DPRK harvest from this autumn through next spring will be 3.5 million tons. That's a million more than the estimates of the WFP and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations , and half a million better than last year - but still 1.5 million tons short of need. So: should we worry about North Koreans going hungry? Yes - and no. More in a future article.

PART 2: Send medicine, not food

((c)2001 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for information on our sales and syndication policies.)