Famine in North Korea: Markets, Aid, and Reform

By generating exports or re-establishing its international credit in order to purchase grain in the world market, or making more timely appeals for humanitarian assistance, the famine might have been avoided altogether. Instead, the government inaugurated a "let's eat two meals a day" campaign. Through acts of both commission and omission, the regime was centrally culpable in this tragedy.

Stephan Haggard is professor at the graduate school of international relations and Pacific studies at the University of California, San Diego, and a visiting fellow at the Institute for International Economics. Among his books are Pathways from the Periphery: Marcus Noland is senior fellow at the Institute for International Economics.

Among his books are Avoiding the Apocalypse: Markets, Aid, and Reform , has observed, famines rest not only on aggregate shortages - distribution matters. As conditions deteriorated, food was distributed unequally across the country, with officialdom and Pyongyang in particular maintaining privileged access.

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Some provinces were cut off from grain supplies from the state-run public distribution system altogether. Once the government appealed for help in , the humanitarian community - more experienced with dealing with cooperative governments or even failed states - confronted breathtaking obstacles thrown up by the "hard" North Korean state. In essence, the regime holds its population hostage to the humanitarian values of the international community.

The World Food Programme WFP and other relief groups had to negotiate astonishing terms for entry, even as people were dying, and more than a decade later, they remain tightly constrained in their access and activities. Some commentators that argue that this aid, channeled through the state-controlled public-distribution system, simply props up the regime - that itself constitutes the root of the problem. Yet withholding aid by some donors is unlikely to change the behaviour of such a regime and in any event could be offset by other parties, which has, in fact, occurred.

The North Korean state's failure to provide and its insistence on practices that degraded the effectiveness of the aid programme forced households and other small-scale social units to pursue a variety of coping strategies. Markets began to develop as families engaged in income-earning activities, sold assets, bartered and traded for food. Work units also engaged in similar activities, even stripping assets to barter for food in China. Just as with the expansion of domestic markets, foreign trade across the Chinese border initially reflected a process of crisis-driven adjustment.

These activities began a process of informal marketisation of the economy from below, with potentially profound implications for the society. Ironically, the very laxity of the aid-monitoring system and the potentially astronomical rents that could be realised by the diversion and sale of aid acted as an additional "lubricant" to encourage the development of markets.

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Jasper Becker, " A gulag with nukes: This is a summary of a book review appearing in a recent edition of the Lancet. Although North Korea had suffered from bad weather, external shocks and low food production, the authors suggest that the cause of famine was primarily the collapse of entitlements, notably the ability of people to command food from the public food distribution system in an authoritarian state. Chronic difficulties in agriculture and food spiralled into a full-blown crisis in with a series of set backs: However, it was neither the weather or shocks which caused the famine but rather state failure of denying people their food entitlement from a collapsed public food distribution system.

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Not all Koreans suffered equally. Hardest hit were the young and elderly, people in the north-eastern provinces and those from lower status occupational groups, such as farmers housekeepers and the jobless. The authors place responsibility for the famine squarely with the North Korean government. They argue that the crisis was systemic, intimately related to the authoritarian structure of government, the absence of accountability to the citizenry, and the denial of political and civil liberties and property rights.

Famine in North Korea: markets, aid and reform | openDemocracy

How much of the government's procrastination and ineptitude were due to malfeasance or lack of information is unclear, which the authors generously accept by considering a range of explanations for failure of the state. Such entitlement failures of socialist political systems are the source of some of the greatest 20th century famines: The international humanitarian aid community is not let off the hook either.

Government insisted upon controlling food aid by restricting the number and movement of foreign staff, blocking agencies from developing independent channels for food delivery, and forcing them to accept assigned Korean translators. Data show that as donated food volumes increased, the government reduced its purchase of imported food. Aidgivers were forced to accept North Korean "exceptionalism", tight restrictions on their oversight, and supervision of donated food. Consequently, aid-givers worried over access to people in need, monitoring and tracking, and outright leakages.

The routing of food aid reflected, respectively, harder line versus softer line in pushing for North Korean cooperation in security negotiations.

Famine in North Korea: Markets, Aid and Reform

Aid-givers thus had mixed humanitarian and political motives, with the latter heightened during political negotiations over North Korea's ambition to develop nuclear armaments. The authors are quick to point out that these difficulties do not mean that aid was without positive benefits. The ruthless behaviour of a self-preserving regime unresponsive to the needs of its citizens was balanced by the mixed motives and poor coordination of foreign aidgivers.

The collapse of the public distribution resulted in a bottoms-up marketisation of food, changing the basic economic pattern of food distribution in North Korea and opening up space to secure food beyond the public distribution system. Drawing on Amartya Sen's entitlement theory of famines, the authors construct food balance sheets that disaggregate North Korea's total food volume into its respective sources and quantities.

By doing so they are able to account for each dimension of Sen's entidement formula, identify changes across each dimension and how these negatively or positively affected aggregate food entitlement packages, and draw conservative conclusions about the proximate causes of those changes. This exercise yields a number of novel conclusions. One, the North Korea famine was indeed due in part to aggregate food shortages and not merely to redistribution failures as some had suggested.

Two, changing trade patterns with China following the collapse of the Soviet Union, namely, China's demanding hard currency for food and energy exports to the DPRK, was the single most proximate trigger of the North Korean famine. Three, diversion of grains by farmers from the state's collective farming regime to underground markets played a greater role in the collapse of the DPRK's public distribution systems PDS than did natural disasters, although flooding of agricultural land duly exacerbated already mounting production failures.

Four, while there is no evidence that North Korea's government exported food during the years of extreme shortage, the central government did reduce food imports comparable to foreign aid received, effectively allowing that aid to displace, rather than supplement, food necessary for maintaining the yet insufficient aggregate entitlement level.

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Just as Nicholas Eberstadt's book, The Population of North Korea , and successive releases of census data have produced de-aggregated, finer-grained images of North Korea's population, Haggard and Noland's book de-aggregates food entitlements across spatial and status variables. The patterns they identify of food distribution in times of scarcity offer concrete examples of the nature and degree of stratification in North Korean society. This narrative is consistent with [End Page ] Armstrong's thesis and constitutes a rich case study of North Korea's geographically segregated status groups.

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