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“I’m not in the business of predicting numbers that are going to die,” [WFP official Gerald Bourke] said. “North Koreans are very tough people. They are very accustomed to deprivation. But that doesn’t take away the urgent need for food aid.”
– BBC Online, Sept. 23, 2005 –
Even last summer, with the World Food Program’s food aid still flowing in, North Korea was suffering from severe food shortages. Today, a frigid winter has set in, and the regime has almost completely stopped the flow of WFP food aid that had provided for 6.5 million North Koreans—a third of the total surviving population.
World Food Program Aid to North Korea Has Effectively Ceased
Just last August, the World Food Program broadcast an urgent global appeal for more food aid for the North. The following month, however, North Korea announced that it no longer needed U.N. food aid, but would consider accepting “development aid” instead. Although it has never been clear what this development aid would consist of, the WFP quickly acceded to the regime’s demands and attempted to solicit aid for a program that has never been defined, and which would presumably be unmonitored and easily diverted to non-humanitarian purposes.
Today, North Korea has reduced the food aid to a trickle, and will force it to a complete end in just two weeks. For thousands of North Korea’s underprivileged citizens–not counting the millions who starved for the sake of the regime’s nuclear buildup in the 1990’s – it is already too late. Yet the United Nations, instead of raising international outrage that could have forced the regime to back down, is conducting a quiet, compliant retreat from North Korea in the face of a potentially catastrophic famine:
The World Food Programme (WFP) is shutting down its food aid programme in North Korea as it moves from feeding people to offering development aid following Pyongyang’s request, officials said. “We’re very much sort of in a closure mode on the humanitarian side,” Richard Ragan, the WFP’s country director for North Korea, told reporters in Beijing.
The UN relief agency has closed down the 19 food processing plants it operated in the country as well as its five sub-offices, Ragan said. “We’ve stopped our programmes. We will not feed anybody past the end of December . . . . We’re only feeding 600,000 people today out of 6.5 million people (WFP had been feeding),” Ragan said.
The WFP has been helping to feed the hungry in North Korea since famine in the mid-1990s killed an estimated two million people.
The current figure of 600,000 recipients is down from 3.6 million just a month ago. The Seattle Times reports that even this trickle of aid will end with the year, and suggests the reasons for this ruthless move:
The World Food Program will halt humanitarian food aid to 6 million North Koreans at the end of this month because the North Korean government says it now has enough food to feed its hungry people, the WFP director said Thursday. The halt of the WFP assistance comes as North Korea expels about a dozen nongovernmental aid groups after European condemnation of its human-rights record.
The halting of the WFP aid appears to be the result of North Korean paranoia about foreigners wandering about in the country, increased economic aid from South Korea and China, and an uptick in agricultural output.
Even accepting the dubious claims of increased harvests and the increased aid from other sources as facts, it still won’t be sufficient to feed the underprivileged:
Morris said his agency thinks “there still is a food shortage in the country,” and that as many as a third of North Korean women remain anemic and in need of nutritional help. A 2004 survey found that 37 percent of the children were chronically malnourished, or “stunted,” and 7 percent of them were acutely malnourished, or “wasted,” Morris said.
. . . .
Even so, WFP food assistance for 6 million people is winding down and will halt entirely by Dec. 31, said Richard Ragan, the director for North Korea. Morris said North Korean officials had made it clear that the country wanted to slash the WFP’s international staff in the country. North Korea also chafed at WFP efforts to monitor food distribution to ensure that the aid arrived in the hands of those most in need.
What ‘Development Aid’ Means
The U.N. still lacks a clear idea of what North Korea means by “development aid;” clearly, no concrete plans exist to provide any form of aid to replace the humanitarian aid on which millions of hungry North Koreans depended:
The head of the WFP, James Morris, who just returned from a two-day trip to Pyongyang, said North Korea had asked WFP to stay in the country and provide development assistance instead. WFP has agreed, and is now negotiating with Pyongyang on the conditions.
“They clearly want us to stay and we want to stay,” Morris told reporters at the press conference. “But we have to be able to stay in a context that will give us a chance to be successful and to continue our focus on the most vulnerable, usually women and children, the poorest people, the most at-risk people.”
Negotiations have stumbled over the size of the WFP expatriate staff and the organisation’s high standards of monitoring where the aid is going, Morris said. “They have concerns about the number of international staff we will have there,” Morris said.
WFP currently has 34 staff members in North Korea including two who are locally hired. The number of staff WFP wants to have in the future will depend on the type of development programme it will run, officials said.
What this means, simply stated, is that no one has the slightest idea what this “development aid” will comprise, or how it will feed any hungry people. Lacking a knowledge of what will even be permitted, it’s obvious that in mid-December, as subzero temperatures are already culling the sick and hungry, the WFP has absolutely no concrete plan to help them. Elsewhere in the world, there is no outrage and no compassion for the innocent victims of a regime that, after all, at least has anti-Americanism going for it.
For its part, the U.S. Agency for International Development has stated that it would not provide North Korea with additional aid unless it could assure that the aid was fairly distributed. With the possible exception of China, which does not disclose how much aid it gives to North Korea, the United States had been North Korea’s largest humanitarian aid donor. Unlike China and South Korea, the United States donates its aid through the World Food Program, which conducted at least a degree of monitoring. China’s aid is believed to be completely unmonitored, and South Korea conducts only token monitoring. Chinese and South Korean aid may be sufficient to sustain the North Korean regime’s elite, thus weakening the WFP’s leverage to insist on more transparent and equal distribution.
Why North Korea Kicked Out the WFP
They’ve been hinting for the past year they wanted us out,” Mr. Ragan says. “They don’t like our monitoring,” he adds, alluding to the WFP’s persistent, if often unsuccessful, efforts at making sure the food got to the neediest, rather than to the North’s 1.1 million troops or to a small circle of party and government officials.
– WFP North Korea Director Richard Ragan, to the Christian Science Monitor, Oct. 17, 2005
International monitoring of food aid represents a double threat to the North Korean regime. First, it hinders the regime’s ability to use food as a weapon of political cleansing against its own people. Second, the presence of foreign aid monitors threatens to put a compassionate face on the outside world, thus undermining official propaganda designed to maintain a xenophobic hostility to foreigners. As a recent Yale Global article stated it,
By limiting the source of food assistance to China and South Korea, a more reliable partner than the United Nations, North Korean leader Kim Jong Il hopes to avoid opening up the politically sensitive hinterland for monitoring by a variety of international food donors.
Closing the door on the international food agency means the regime is determined to safeguard its security – even at the risk of triggering a new famine.
WFP monitoring of North Korean food aid distribution has never been very effective. For years, the World Food Program’s failure to insist on strict monitoring of food distribution in North Korea had been a matter of bitter controversy. Throughout the years of the WFP’s operations in the North, many North Koreans continued to starve, or to flee from the North in search of a way to survive. The American academics Marcus Noland and Stephen Haggard recently estimated that as much as 30% of international food aid to North Korea is diverted before it reaches the intended recipients. Noland and Haggard believe that most of the diversion results from high market prices, which creates a profit motive for diverting food to cash markets, where only North Korea’s privileged can afford to buy. The BBC, discussing North Korea’s abortive market “reforms” with the writer Paul French, put it this way:
“Who can afford this stuff in the markets?” asked Mr. French.
The answer: only the elite. Government officials, senior managers of state enterprises, security forces, and the leadership of the army are all unlikely to go hungry.
But a typical urban family can now only afford to buy 4kg of maize – the cheapest commodity – a month.
Worse, the North Korean regime keeps foreign aid workers out of vast “closed” areas of North Korea–entirely. The North Korean Freedom Coalition recently published the map as above of international aid access to North Korea’s counties:
The WFP did not accede to North Korea’s severe restrictions on monitoring without controversy. In his book, The Great North Korean Famine, Andrew Natsios, who recently announced his resignation as Administrator of USAID, described a code of conduct to which international aid groups had agreed before the scale of North Korea’s famine was well known. Central to that code of conduct was an insistence on the monitoring of food aid distribution, and the equal provision of aid to all regardless of class or politics. Natsios wrote of how quickly the aid groups buckled when North Korea balked at monitoring:
By the summer of 1997 relief agencies were privately wringing their collective hands that the North Korean government had trashed the Code of Conduct without the least protest by anyone. . . . These violations were more systematic, more widespread, and more egregious than in any crisis since the code was written. . . .
Nearly all of these principles require unimpeded access to victims, accountability of aid, and the complete transparency of relief operations, none of which existed in North Korea. The eligibility lists for receiving relief aid were compiled entirely by government official; no one knew for sure who was on these lists, since NGOs were not allowed to have Korean speakers or readers in their delegations. The recipients could well have been party cadre and military families.
Meanwhile, the regime is attempting to reconstitute its crumbled Public Distribution System, apparently to regain political control over the food supply. For a much more extensive discussion of international NGO reports that accuse the regime of discriminating against politically disfavored classes in the distribution of food, see this entry, and this one.
What the United Nations Should Have Done
Here is a short list of things that the WFP should have done two months ago, but has not done, and will probably never do:
– Publicly denounce the North Korean regime for refusing food aid, and demand that the regime reverse its decision.
– Refusal to go along with the regime’s cynical demand for “development aid.”
– Declare the existence of a food emergency or an impending famine.
– Publicly demand that China and South Korea deliver their aid through the WFP.
– Publicly demand the establishment of feeding stations or refugee camps along the Chinese or South Korean borders, and elevate the issue to the General Assembly and the Security Council if necessary.
– Impose an arms embargo on a regime that has no business whatsoever buying, selling, or making arms while its population starves.
– Threaten economic or trade sanctions unless the regime opens North Korea up to transparent food distribution.
– Warn North Korea’s leaders that it will hold them accountable before an international tribunal for crimes against humanity.
– Freeze the regime’s international assets; place those assets in escrow, to be used only for monitored food aid.
Any member of the U.N. Security Council, including the United States, could bring these issues before the U.N. Security Council, but none has yet done so. No nation is blameless in the universal apathy about North Korea’s Great Famine of 2006.
Joshua Stanton is an attorney in Washington, D.C. and maintains a Web log on North Korean affairs at http://freekorea.blogspot.com. The views expressed here are his own and not those of any other person or entity.
