Hunger and Human Rights:
The Politics of Famine

North Korea is well into its second decade of chronic food shortages. A famine in the 1990s killed as many as one million North Koreans or roughly five percent of the population. North Korean claims that the famine was due primarily to natural disasters and external shocks are misleading in important respects. The decline in food production and the deterioration of the public distribution system (PDS) were visible years before the floods of 1995. Moreover, the government was culpably slow to take the necessary steps to guarantee adequate food supplies. With plausible policy adjustments-such as maintaining food imports on commercial terms or aggressively seeking multilateral assistance-the government could have avoided the famine and the shortages that continue to plague the country. Instead, the regime blocked humanitarian aid to the hardest hit parts of the country during the peak of the famine and curtailed commercial imports of food once humanitarian assistance began.

Coping responses by households during the famine contributed to a bottom-up marketization of the economy, ratified by the economic policy changes introduced by the North Korean government in 2002. What began as a socialist famine arising out of failed agricultural policies and a misguided emphasis on food self-sufficiency has evolved into a chronic food emergency more akin to those observed in market and transition economies. Incomplete reforms have not solved the problem of declining food production and have given rise to a large food-insecure population among the urban non-elite.

The world community has responded to this tragedy with considerable generosity, committing more than $2 billion in food aid to the country over the past decade. The United States has contributed more than $600 million, equivalent to 2 million metric tons of grain. Yet at virtually every point, the North Korean government has placed roadblocks in the way of the donor community, and more than 10 years into this process, the relief effort remains woefully below international standards in terms of transparency and effectiveness. Up to half of aid deliveries do not reach their intended recipients.

Due to these programmatic problems, diplomatic conflicts, and competing needs elsewhere in the world, patience with North Korea has waned among some major donors. In recent years, aid through the World Food Programme (WFP), the principle channel for delivering multilateral assistance, has consistently fallen short of its targets. At the same time, North Korea has been able to partly, if not fully, compensate for these shortfalls through generous assistance from South Korea and China. The bilateral assistance from these countries is weakly monitored, if conditional at all, and thus undercuts the ability of the WFP and other donors to negotiate improvements in the transparency, and ultimately, effectiveness, of multilateral assistance.

These problems cannot be separated from the underlying political situation in the country; it is misguided to separate the humanitarian and human rights discourses. North Korea would have faced difficulties in the 1990s regardless of its regime type. But it is difficult to imagine a famine of this magnitude, or chronic food shortages of this duration, occurring in a regime that protected basic political and civil liberties.