Hunger and Human Rights:
The Politics of Famine

After 1995, it is impossible to discuss the nature of the North Korean food situation without reference to the humanitarian response, which consisted of three distinct components: aid channeled through multilateral institutions, and the WFP in particular; bilateral aid outside the WFP; and assistance from the NGO sector. The NGO sector has made important contributions to easing the crisis; several excellent studies have reviewed this experience in some detail (Smith 2002; Flake and Snyder 2003; Reed 2004). But the bulk of food assistance has passed through multilateral and bilateral channels, and this report focuses attention on them (Figure 5).

The United States has been the largest donor of food aid to North Korea, but it is certainly not the only one: European countries-both individually and through the European Commission- Japan, China, and South Korea have all provided aid as well (Figure 6). This multiplicity of donors necessarily created coordination problems among them. Since the monitoring of food aid is in effect a bargaining game between the international community and North Korea, handing more unconditional aid out can have adverse effects on the country's willingness to comply with basic humanitarian principles. Two countries, China and South Korea, provide concessional sales or grants of food to North Korea outside of the WFP. The nature of China's contracts with North Korea is not directly evident, but there is no public evidence that they have conditioned aid either on overall policy reform or more particular principles of programmatic design, implementation, or monitoring. In the case of South Korea, aid has been provided with only the most minimal effort to monitor its distribution, as human rights groups in the country have noted.

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There are numerous disadvantages in this arrangement. If China and South Korea become the suppliers of last resort, it provides the North Korean government the opportunity to further erode the modest and ineffective monitoring regime that is in place. North Korea has been able to avoid a more stringent monitoring regime-and has recently challenged the WFP's most basic mandate-as a result of alternative sources of less conditional supply.

In this respect, the policy choices of the South Korean government have been most disappointing. South Korea extended large-scale aid in the immediate aftermath of the floods in 1995, but was stung by North Korean efforts to hide the source of its assistance and pursued a restrictive aid policy until the inauguration of the Kim Dae Jung administration in 1998. Particularly after the historic summit meeting of 2000, both the Kim Dae Jung and Roh Moo Hyun administrations have extended large amounts of fertilizer and food aid to the North, in addition to other forms of transfers. Relatively open-ended aid commitments-totaling as much as half of North Korea's total food deficit according to the WFP-could have the unintended consequence of undercutting the WFP's attempts to uphold the norms embodied in international agreements to which South Korea is a party.