Hunger and Human Rights:
The Politics of Famine

Korea was colonized by Japan in the first decade of the 20th century, and at the end of the Second World War was divided into zones of Soviet and U.S. military occupation in the North and South, respectively. Unable to agree on a formula for unification, in 1948 the Republic of Korea proclaimed sovereignty in the South and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea did the same in the North. In 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea in a bid to unify the peninsula, eventually drawing in a U.S.-dominated UN contingent in support of the South. China subsequently entered the war in support of the North. Combat ended with an armistice in 1953, with a truce line that differed little from what had been reached on the battlefield over a year before.

Historically, the northern part of the Korean peninsula was the more industrially developed and the more agrarian south was the breadbasket. With the partition of the peninsula following the Second World War, North Korea adopted a centrally planned economy along Soviet lines, and pursued the objective of food security-the quite understandable concern with security of supplies-through a misplaced commitment to food self-sufficiency, a policy of seeking to meet demand entirely through domestic production. The commitment to self-sufficiency was pursued not only at the national level, but was pushed down to the provincial, and even county level as well. Given the country's high ratio of population to arable land, and its relatively northern latitude and short growing seasons, this strategy proved problematic and contributed to recurrent food problems of which the present crisis is only the most recent example.

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Although founding leader Kim Il Sung made juche, typically translated as "self-reliance," the ideological centerpiece of the regime, in fact the country relied heavily on its socialist allies for aid. The Soviet Union was the most important player, supporting the country with heavily subsidized supplies of energy, fertilizer, and manufactured products. The rapidly changing diplomatic landscape of the late Cold War period had important consequences for North Korea. As Moscow recognized South Korea and the Soviet Union collapsed, North Korea was both diplomatically isolated and cut off from important sources of concessional trade. China stepped into the breach to some extent, but it too had shifted diplomatic course and sought hard currency for its exports.

These external shocks were profound. Embroiled in a nuclear confrontation with the United States from 1992 to 1994, then undergoing a political transition with the death of Kim Il-sung just as the nuclear crisis was resolved, the leadership was slow to react. It is this failure to adjust aggressively to these fundamental geopolitical and economic changes that constitutes the root cause of the famine.

There is some disagreement about trends in production, especially with respect to the period from 1995 to 1996 when the country was hit by devastating floods. But best estimates suggest that grain output in North Korea began declining in the early 1990s (Figure 1). Because of the emphasis on self-sufficiency in food and the generally inhospitable environment for growing it, the North Korean government had developed an agricultural system that was highly dependent on a range of industrial inputs such as chemical fertilizers, insecticides, and electrically-driven irrigation systems. As the industrial economy began to implode from the withdrawal of subsidies from the Soviet Union, Russia, and then China, supply of these crucial industrial inputs fell and agricultural yields followed suit.

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Food is distributed to the civilian population of North Korea through two channels. Workers on state and cooperative farms account for roughly 30 percent of the population. Most of these farmers are granted an annual allotment of grain at the time of the harvest. However, the country is highly urbanized and the bulk of the population is fed through the PDS. The PDS distributes food as a monthly or biweekly ration. Rations, in turn, vary according to occupational status as well as age. For example, high-ranking party, government, and military officials are fed through separate distribution channels and receive higher rations, as do certain classes of workers (Table 1). But occupational status, in turn, rests on political status to an important extent. Access to better jobs, party membership, and desirable residential locations, such as Pyongyang, are all affected by a complex political classification system related to family background and perceived loyalty to the regime.

As domestic output fell and the PDS was increasingly unable to fulfill its mandate, rations were cut. In 1987, rations were cut following the first reduction in Soviet assistance. In 1991, the government initiated a "let's eat two meals a day" campaign. A series of refugee surveys document that for at least some segments of the population, the PDS began failing to supply food on a regular basis-or at all-around this time. By 1994, a majority of refugees interviewed reported that the PDS had collapsed in their localities of origin (Korean Buddhist Sharing Movement 1998, Robinson et al. 1999, Robinson et al. 2001).

Careful analysis of North Korean data suggests that death rates were probably elevated by 1993, and certainly by 1994, signaling the outset of famine as typically defined. The North Korean government did step up its quest for commercial imports and made early appeals for food aid to both the United States and Japan. Yet the government was not forthcoming about the extent of distress, and these signals were mixed. As the situation deteriorated during the lean months of the spring of 1995, the North Koreans reached out, obtaining in May a commitment from first Japan, and then South Korea, to provide emergency assistance. The first ship carrying aid to the country left port in June.

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In July and August, the country experienced significant floods. The floods reflected the typical seasonal pattern of rainfall on the Korean peninsula, but they were exacerbated by the El Niño effect. However, the effects of the flood were also worsened by topsoil erosion and river silting that had followed the deforestation of hillsides as more and more marginal land was brought under cultivation to maximize output and to cope with shortages. The floods were significant events because they provided the government a political basis for making a full-blown appeal to the international community. For example, the governmental unit that had been established to serve as the liaison with foreign donors was renamed the Flood Damage Rehabilitation Committee (FDRC), a designation that it retains to this day. Similar floods followed in 1996, and thereafter the country experienced a succession of weather-related difficulties (Woo-Cumings 2002).

There is no question that bad weather made a difficult situation worse, but it is not obvious that the floods were the primary or even proximate cause of the North Korean famine (Noland, Robinson, and Wang 2001). It is essential to place the effect of the weather in the context of two other crucial factors: the secular decline in the North Korean economy, and in the agricultural sector in particular; and the failure of the government to respond to this crisis by maintaining adequate commercial imports or by making clear and timely appeals to the international community. The decline in the economy resulted in part from external shocks, but even more fundamentally from the misguided effort to pursue a strategy of selfsufficiency, including in food. Had the government sent unambiguous signs of distress, the humanitarian community would have responded as it ultimately did. But delay in famine settings is fatal. Even well-intentioned supporters of humanitarian aid were still debating the true extent of the country's food problems as late as 1997 because of the paucity of reliable information.

If the North Korean government's refusal to reach out in the early 1990s amounted to a sin of omission, then its behavior once aid began flowing in 1996 constitutes an equally disturbing set of sins of commission. As aid began arriving, the country simultaneously moved to reduce its commercial imports of food (Figure 2). This curious feature of North Korean behavior-while the famine was continuing to take its toll-has not previously received the attention it deserves. Rather than use aid to supplement local production and commercial imports, aid has substituted for, or "crowded out," commercial imports. North Korea, in effect, has stopped importing grain through commercial routes. As a result, over the last several years more than 90 percent of the grain brought into North Korea has been in the form of aid or concessional imports.

Another way of casting these observations is in terms the government's priorities. Rather than using humanitarian assistance as an addition to domestic production and commercial sources of supply, the government has used aid largely as balance-of-payments support, allowing it to allocate the savings in commercial imports to other priorities, including military ones and luxury imports for the elite. For example, in 1999, at the same time that it was cutting commercial grain imports to less than 200,000 metric tons, the government allocated scarce foreign exchange to the purchase of 40 MiG-21 fighters and 8 military helicopters from Kazakhastan.

Moreover, one could argue that aid had another "crowding out" effect of reducing pressure to undertake reform of the agricultural sector. The failure of domestic production to return to even its 1990 level is evidence not only of the collapse of inputs, but of the halting nature of market-oriented and incentive-based reforms.

The implications of this analysis of the import behavior of the government can be seen in Figure 3, which contains estimates of minimum human demand and normal human demand derived from Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) and WFP estimates. The Australian economist Heather Smith has pointed out that the FAO/WFP estimates (which were raised in the midst of the famine) embodied questionable assumptions both aboutthe role of cereals in the North Korean diet and appeared to contradict the North Korean government's own historical data on grain consumption. Adjusting for either the composition of the diet (by assuming that a greater share of calories are coming from non-grain sources) or for the historical pattern of consumption in North Korea (and other Asian countries as well) generates a reduction in the minimum human needs target of roughly 20 percent (Smith 1998).

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As can be seen in Figure 3, the minimum human-needs target, adjusted or unadjusted, was met in every year, at least casting doubt on whether the North Korean famine was the result of an absolute lack of food. Indeed, the much higher normal human needs target that embodies a "normal" level of consumption beyond survival needs, was met half the time during the early and mid-1990s, even as the famine was cresting. It is only from the late-1990s to the present that actual aggregate food supplies have not met normal human demands. The reason for this appears clear from the calculations conducted for this report: commercial imports collapse.

Figure 3 reports two counterfactual supply lines-the first is what would have been aggregate supply if commercial imports had stayed at their 1993 levels and North Korea had aid.