The Next Great North Korean Famine

By BILL POWELL/SHANGHAI Wed May 7, 11:15 AM ET

Nearly one million people starved to death when a murderous famine gripped North Korea in the 1990s. Now, the most backward, isolated country in the world may be about to see history repeat itself. According to diplomats, United Nations officials and a variety of non-government organizations, North Korea stands yet again on the brink of a major food shortage. "The prospect of hunger related deaths in the next few months is approaching certainty," says Marcus Noland, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute and co-author of a just released study raising alarms about the prospect of renewed famine. In fact, one Seoul-based NGO, the Research Institute for North Korean Society, asserts that there have already been a handful of people in small, agricultural villages who have died from starvation.

The emerging shortages demonstrate, again, how vexing it is for the outside world to deal with Kim Jong Il and his regime. Less than two weeks after U.S. intelligence officials in Washington presented evidence that Pyongyang had helped Syria build a nuclear reactor - a site destroyed by the Israeli air force last September - sources tell TIME that a team of U.S. diplomats and officials from the U.S. Agency for International Development is now in Pyongyang, as part of the overall nuclear talks, trying to negotiate an expedited package of food aid. The U.S. has proposed giving the North 500,000 metric tons of grain, but only if the North agrees to some monitoring of its distribution to ensure that the food is not diverted to the military or to the North Korean political elite.

The Bush administration dangled the assistance last month as a carrot in front of Kim: if North Korea delivered a "satisfactory" declaration on its entire nuclear weapons program, as it agreed to do in the so-called six-party talks, the extra food aid from the U.S. would kick in. In the eyes of some current and former diplomats, the North never has come clean about all aspects of its nuclear program, but the urgency of the food situation has now apparently made that a secondary concern. "No one wants a rerun of the 1990s or anything close to that," says one east Asian diplomat. "The world won't stand for it, even if Kim Jong Il might."

There are several causes underlying the emerging crisis, experts say. One is the savage flooding North Korea experienced in August of last year, which devastated large swathes of farmland, thus limiting the North's own ability to produce grain. "The current balance between grain requirements and supply in the North is more precarious than at any time since the 90s," says Noland. Political tension, particularly between the North and new South Korean government of Lee Myung Bak, is also playing a role. Lee, a month after his inauguration earlier this year, decided he would continue Seoul's humanitarian assistance of food aid and fertilizer regardless of progress in the nuclear talks - but only if the North requested it. He has made all other economic dealings with Pyongyang contingent on the North's good nuclear behavior, and that has infuriated Kim.

Indeed, despite the mounting evidence of trouble on the North Korean farm, Kim refused to request more hand outs from Seoul, and turned instead to China for additional food supplies. But the global run up in food prices has hamstrung Beijing's response. Starting in December 2007, as public discontent about rising food prices in China grew, Beijing implemented a series of measures to reduce its grain exports. Among other things, it eliminated a 13% tax rebate on grain exports. Since a substantial portion of Chinese grown rice and grains go to the North on commercial terms - Beijing's overall agricultural trade and aid to Pyongyang is an official state secret, so no one knows precisely how much - those policy changes hurt overall food supply in the North, and also helped continue to drive up food prices in the country.

In fact, the Peterson Institute's study - which includes a survey of 1,300 refugees from the North living in China - shows that the North has been as vulnerable to rising food prices as anyone else on the globe. (Starting in 2002 the regime allowed market prices for food to prevail for much of the country, though the military and government workers continue to get subsidized food supplies). The result, according to the "fragmentary" evidence compiled by the Peterson Institute, has been a tripling of food prices just in the last year - a run up so sharp that it signals the panic buying often associated with pre-famine conditions.

Diplomatic and NGO sources in Seoul now say that Beijing has begun to move to address the emerging North Korean shortages. In March and April it donated at least 50,000 metric tons of food aid to Pyongyang. With the Olympics in August and a crackdown on North Korean refugees sneaking into China already well underway, Beijing wants nothing to do with the exodus from the North a growing food crisis would inevitably spur.

How bad might it get in North Korea? Most aid workers in Seoul believe that the current shortages won't equal the famine of the 1990s, in part because this time the outside world has been alerted to the deteriorating conditions sooner than it was a decade ago. But, as Noland points out, North Korea not only needs immediate food assistance, it needs to import a significant amount of fertilizer or it risks another bad harvest this year, further compounding the deepening food problem. (After the North's nuclear test in the fall of 2006, South Korea stopped supplying fertilizer, which had been a key component of its aid to Pyongyang). Among the steps Pyongyang urgently needs to take now, Noland and others believe, are to conclude negotiations for expanded aid from the World Food Program. (Pyongyang sharply curtailed the activities of the organization following a rare bumper crop in the North three years ago.) Kim also has to swallow his pride and ask the South to re-start the flow of food assistance to the North.

Seoh Jae-jean, Director for NK Studies Division at Seoul's Korea Institute for National Unification, also believes that Pyongyang's recent "crackdown on black markets'' has exacerbated shortages. "If they leave people alone, people will find ways to survive with agility and flexibility. The government's attempt to control the private market is making matters worse," he says. But leaving people in his own country alone has never been Kim Jong Il's strong suit. Letting them suffer and, in the past, starve to death, has been his inclination. Will 2008 be different? With Stephen Kim/SeoulTime.com