N. Korea cuts off U.N. food, ignites famine fears

Kari Huus Reporter • Profile • E-mail

The New Year seldom brings much to celebrate in North Korea — where food and energy shortages regularly accompany a long, bitter winter. This time around the outlook is even more uncertain, as Pyongyang’s Stalinist government moves to reassert control over the food supply, a move some experts fear will lead the isolated country into another famine.

With the end of 2005, the U.N.'s World Food Program is slated to shut down its decade-long food distribution effort in North Korea after Pyongyang told the organization that the aid was no longer needed. The program was the biggest multinational humanitarian program in the country and was instrumental in pulling North Korea out of a famine that killed up to 2.5 million people in the mid-1990s and drove many to flee the country.

At the same time, the government announced it would revert to central control of all grain distribution, shutting down market-based experiments in grain sales that started in 2002. Then the military reportedly seized grain earmarked as incentives for growers, while promising increased rations across the board.

‘The state has ... reneged’
“After implementing incentives for growers … the state has basically gone in and reneged,” said Marcus Noland, senior fellow at the International Institute for Economics in Washington. The combination of these policy changes could be lethal, he says. “They may be setting themselves up for another humanitarian crisis.”

North Korea fell on hard times after the end of the Cold War when support from Moscow dried up. While the Soviet Union dismantled and communist ally China moved towards market reforms, Pyongyang remained one of the most insular nations in the world under Kim Il Song, with tight controls over political and social realms. It has remained so under his son, President Kim Jong Il. While its 22 million people struggle with poverty, the regime largely shuns outside interference. Allowing food aid over the past 10 years was a rare exception.

In the short run, Pyongyang may well be able to make ends meet. Satellite photos reportedly show that the country’s 2005 harvest was better than in previous years, by some accounts 10 percent above levels of recent years. And both Beijing and Seoul, seeking to prevent a collapse and chaos in the neighborhood, are set to continue sending food aid to North Korea on a bilateral basis.

But the margin is narrow at best. Chronic malnourishment and food insecurity is widespread in North Korea. The population outside the main cities lives perpetually on the edge of hunger, and natural disasters like the drought and flooding that contributed to the emergency a decade earlier could easily plunge the country back into a food crisis.

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