Hunger and Human Rights:
The Politics of Famine

The notion of famine conjures up disturbing images of emaciated people and wasting, listless children. Confronted with the devastating impact of inadequate caloric intake on the human body, one's understandable impulse is to think of famine in terms of physical shortages of food supplies. Yet in the contemporary world, the sources of food insecurity increasingly can be traced not to natural causes but to human ones. Today there is no reason for anyone to starve as a result of weather conditions, food shortages, or even failures in distribution. Global food supplies are adequate. Information on weather patterns and crop conditions is now readily available, providing an effective early warning system of potential shortfalls and crises. Global markets for basic grains are well developed and highly integrated and the world community has developed a well-institutionalized system of humanitarian assistance.

A series of international covenants have made explicit the commitment to a world without hunger. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights enshrined the right to adequate food. The 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) elaborated this commitment as "the fundamental right of everyone to be free from hunger." At the 1996 World Food Summit, official delegations from 185 countries, including representatives from the governments of the United States and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (the DPRK or North Korea), reaffirmed "the right of everyone to have access to safe and nutritious food, consistent with the right to adequate food and the fundamental right of everyone to be free of hunger." 1

When initially articulated, these rights looked more like pious wishes than achievable objectives. But an effective set of global institutions is now capable of making these political commitments viable by soliciting food contributions and delivering emergency assistance to populations facing distress from natural disasters and economic dislocation. With effective institutions and adequate physical supplies, the occurrence of famine increasingly signals not the lack of food or capacity, but some fundamental political or governance failure. Natural conditions are no longer our primary adversaries: humans are.

The case of North Korea, where a chronic food emergency is well into its second decade, is an egregious example of this phenomenon. Although estimates vary widely, a famine in the mid-1990s killed as many as one million North Koreans, or roughly five percent of the population. Millions more were left to contend with broken lives and personal misery. Particularly worrisome are the long-term effects-including irreversible ones-on the human development of infants and children.

Conditions in North Korea today are less tenuous than during the worst of the famine, thanks in part to humanitarian assistance from the world community. Yet despite this assistance, millions of North Koreans remain chronically food insecure. When the food crisis began, access to food came through a public distribution system (PDS) controlled by the regime and entitlements were partly a function of political status. As the socialist economy crumbled and markets developed in response to the state's inability to fulfill its obligations under the old social compact, the character of the crisis changed. Current shortages bear closer resemblance to food emergencies in market and transition economies, where access to food is determined by one's capacity to command resources in the marketplace. This type of emergency is no less severe, but poses different challenges to outside donors.

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. Despite its strained political relations with North Korea, the United States has been the largest donor of humanitarian assistance since 1995, contributing over $600 million in food aid, equivalent to over 2 million metric tons of grain. Yet a host of tensions and competing demands have contributed to fatigue among donors, including both the United States and Japan. These include diplomatic conflicts over the North Korean nuclear program and Japan's abductees; the apparent lack of progress in addressing the country's underlying economic problems; concerns about the transparency and effectiveness of the humanitarian relief program; and its potential role in propping up a totalitarian regime. A variety of other humanitarian disasters, from the Horn of Africa to the countries affected by the tsunami of 2005, have placed strains on the humanitarian system, and forced a re-evaluation of where aid will be most effectively deployed.

North Korea's food problems pose a distinctive set of challenges for the international community. In many humanitarian crises, the international community faces failed states or conflict settings that make it difficult to provide assistance. In North Korea, by contrast, the international community faces a "hard" state that has repeatedly shown a willingness to allow its population to suffer extreme deprivation. The government also tightly controls access by outsiders. Such a setting raises a number of fundamental and inter-related questions for donors, whether multilateral, bilateral, or non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Should the international community provide assistance even if it means prolonging the life of a despotic regime? Does aid prolong the very policies that led to the famine in the first place? Should donors provide assistance even if some portion of that assistance is diverted to undeserving groups, including the military and party cadre? If the decision is made to provide assistance, how can donors guarantee that food aid reaches vulnerable groups and achieves other objectives, such as inducing economic reforms or empowering new social groups?

These questions are ultimately ethical ones. It is impossible in such a setting to guarantee that all aid is being used appropriately; that is precisely why humanitarian aid to North Korea poses policy and moral dilemmas. One response to this quandary is to conclude, erroneously, that concerns over human rights and the humanitarian impulse stand in opposition. Given that human rights are meaningless in the absence of the basic sustenance required to maintain life itself, the humanitarian imperative necessarily trumps human rights concerns and requires continued engagement even where basic rights are denied. Over the longer-run, it has been argued that meeting basic economic needs provides the foundation for subsequent political development, including the granting of human and political rights.

The separation of humanitarian considerations from a human rights discourse, however, is fundamentally flawed. North Korea's tragedy has many roots, but a famine of this magnitude could only have occurred in a system in which the political leadership was insulated from events on the ground and lacking in accountability to its people. The failure of the North Korean government to guarantee adequate supplies of food to its population is inextricably linked to the government's denial of a battery of rights to its citizens: to confront public officials with their shortcomings; to publicize information that allows government officials to know the extent of distress; and to organize collectively in the face of injustice and deprivation. If these rights were present, North Korea might well have faced food shortages, but it is highly doubtful that a great famine would have occurred or that the government would be presiding over an economy characterized by chronic shortages of food.

Internationally, the closed nature of the North Korean system and the continued willingness of the North Korean regime to flout international accords impose tremendous obstacles for official and private organizations engaged in relief operations there. The absence of human rights constituted an enabling condition for the development of the famine in the first place, and has subsequently proven an obstacle to that tragedy's amelioration. The humanitarian disaster and the denial of the panoply of human, civil, and political rights cannot be meaningfully disentangled or divorced.

Yet stating these relationships does not necessarily solve the moral dilemmas facing the humanitarian community, both public and private, and the North Korean case poses problems of strategy as well as morality. How does the outside world deal with a regime that, in effect, holds its own population hostage to the humanitarian impulses of outsiders? These questions demand a careful review of what has worked in North Korea and what has not.

Background of the current food shortages and the causes of the great famine of the mid-1990s. 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 was visible well before the floods of 1995 but the government was slow to take the steps necessary to guarantee adequate food supplies. To attribute the famine primarily to external causes-natural or manmade-is to neglect the fundamental failure of the North Korean government to respond to its changed circumstances in a timely and appropriate way.

With plausible policy adjustments-such as maintaining food imports on commercial terms or aggressively seeking multilateral assistance-the government could have avoided the great famine and the current shortages that continue to exist. Instead, it blocked humanitarian aid to the hardest hit parts of the country during the peak of the famine and curtailed commercial imports of food as humanitarian assistance began to arrive. Rather than supplementing supply, the government has used aid largely as balance-of-payments support, cutting commercial food imports, and reallocating expenditures to other priorities, including the military.

The famine unleashed profound changes in the North Korean economy and society. The government had long criminalized a number of behaviors that households rely on during food shortages, such as travel in search of food and various forms of trade. Yet the government was unable to control these coping strategies altogether, and they contributed to a bottom-up marketization of the economy. Households came to rely on the market rather than the collapsed PDS for their food, even before the economic policy changes of 2002. What began as a socialist famine arising out of failed agricultural policies and a misguided emphasis on self-reliance evolved into a chronic emergency more akin to those in market economies. Access to food in North Korea is no longer a function of the PDS, but of position in the market. The divide between those who could augment their wages with foreign exchange and other sources of income and those who could not has steadily widened.

The international aid effort. In confronting the fundamentally non-cooperative stance of the North Korean government, the humanitarian community has pursued two basic strategies to guarantee the integrity of its assistance: targeting of vulnerable groups, and monitoring of food deliveries to assure that these targeted populations are being reached. At virtually every point, the North Korean government has placed roadblocks in the way of the donor community, which succeeded to the extent that it did only through extraordinary perspicacity and flexibility. Yet even by its own admission, this monitoring effort is a leaky sieve, and it is estimated that between 10 and 30 percent of food aid is diverted.

Most concerns with diversion center on the appropriation of food by the military. Military and party elites have other sources of food; an equal if not greater problem is the diversion of food to the market or to less deserving groups.

Monitoring is not an end in itself-ultimately donors are concerned about the impact of relief. Again, North Korean obstructionism has hindered the development of persuasive evidence on the effects of the relief effort to date. This report examines the most recent UNsponsored nutritional survey, as well as other evidence that has not been fully explored. This evidence includes refugee interviews, data on prices, and a consideration of the nature and evolution of access to and the distribution of food, including changes since the initiation of economic policy changes in mid-2002. The evidence is imperfect, but suggests that the crisis is by no means over, and significant segments of the population remain undernourished.

The aid process from the perspective of the donors. Despite the fact that the international community has a well-developed institutional machinery for delivering aid in the World Food Programme (WFP), humanitarian assistance is of necessity tied up with the conflicting political interests of donors. In the last several years, patience with North Korea has been waning in the United States and Japan, and overall stresses on the emergency relief system have made it harder to meet targets while multilateral aid has declined. Yet North Korea has been able to partly, if not fully, compensate for these losses by generous assistance from South Korea, increasing EU involvement, and continuing reliance on quasi-commercial imports of food and other inputs from China. These sources of aid, and particularly Chinese and South Korean assistance, are weakly monitored, if they are conditional at all, and thus reduce the ability of outsiders to press the North Korean government on issues of monitoring and transparency.