Evidence has emerged that foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) may have broken out in North Korea. Therefore, the question of whether the South Korean government might provide aid to combat any proven outbreak of the disease has arisen.
An official inside the South Korean administration said today, “Intelligence exists to suggest that FMD broke out late last year in North Korea. We are currently working out the exact damage,” while another official added, “I heard from a Japanese citizen who visited the North that FMD has occurred in the country.”
The second official also said, “We are aware that the North Korean authorities have been mobilizing military bases to disinfect cow and pig farms nationwide.”
Due to an outbreak of FMD in the vicinity of Pyongyang, the authorities have apparently also set up temporary checkpoints in order to control unnecessary internal migration, intelligence suggests.
However, North Korea has not released anything about FMD officially, and has apparently not asked international organizations for aid. Thus, an official with the Ministry of Unification cautioned today, “There are difficulties in terms of finding out the facts officially,” and added, “It is not a situation where we can talk about aid before judging the real situation.
Considering that the South suspended flood relief aid, which is ostensibly humanitarian, following the Yeonpyeong attack, it will not be easy to say yes to any aid request. However, since the South’s basic principle on North Korea is to divide humanitarian issues from political issues, if North Korea calls for aid it will also be hard to ignore, and FMD could equally come to undermine the South’s principled stance.
In the past the North has gone through a formulaic procedure in order to get aid: Pyongyang reported the reality to international organizations; the South expressed its willingness to give aid; the North released the scale of the real damage; and then the South decided to give aid. However, reporting the situation to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) and simultaneously calling on the South to give aid would be somewhat different.
With public opinion on urgent humanitarian aid generally positive, North Korea could in this way use the situation in order to engender domestic conflict in South Korea and put pressure on the government in Seoul to open wider contacts with the North Korean regime.
In 2007 when the South Korean administration found out about the outbreak of FMD in North Korea through international organizations, it provided 22 kinds of preventive medicines and equipment worth approximately $2.4 million in total.
