Famine in North Korea: Markets, Aid, and Reform

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The book also contrasts the systems and norms of North Korea and its peers in the international community, underscoring the regrettable absence of diplomatic, economic, and ideological frameworks through which parties involved can readily communicate, negotiate, and cooperate. The authors spend the final chapters of the book discussing these issues and proposing solutions.

This practical, actionable orientation infuses the intellectually satisfying volume with optimism and added relevance to scholars, aid workers, and policy makers alike. Haggard and Noland present their analysis in three sections: Organized in like manner, this review highlights the authors' novel findings in [End Page ] each section and discusses die broader contributions of these findings to our understanding of North Korean society.

The book's first section examines the proximate causes and specific effects of North Korea's famine.

Korean Studies

Drawing on Amartya Sen's entitlement theory of famines, the authors construct food balance sheets that disaggregate North Korea's total food volume into its respective sources and quantities. By doing so they are able to account for each dimension of Sen's entidement formula, identify changes across each dimension and how these negatively or positively affected aggregate food entitlement packages, and draw conservative conclusions about the proximate causes of those changes. This exercise yields a number of novel conclusions.

One, the North Korea famine was indeed due in part to aggregate food shortages and not merely to redistribution failures as some had suggested. Two, changing trade patterns with China following the collapse of the Soviet Union, namely, China's demanding hard currency for food and energy exports to the DPRK, was the single most proximate trigger of the North Korean famine. Three, diversion of grains by farmers from the state's collective farming regime to underground markets played a greater role in the collapse of the DPRK's public distribution systems PDS than did natural disasters, although flooding of agricultural land duly exacerbated already mounting production failures.

Four, while there is no evidence that North Korea's government exported food during the years of extreme shortage, the central government did reduce food imports comparable to foreign aid received, effectively allowing that aid to displace, rather than supplement, food necessary for maintaining the yet insufficient aggregate entitlement level. Just as Nicholas Eberstadt's book, The Population of North Korea , and successive releases of census data have produced de-aggregated, finer-grained images of North Korea's population, Haggard and Noland's book de-aggregates food entitlements across spatial and status variables.

Famine in North Korea: markets, aid and reform | openDemocracy

The patterns they identify of food distribution in times of scarcity offer concrete examples of the nature and degree of stratification in North Korean society. This narrative is consistent with [End Page ] Armstrong's thesis and constitutes a rich case study of North Korea's geographically segregated status groups.

Markets, Aid, and Reform , has observed, famines rest not only on aggregate shortages - distribution matters. As conditions deteriorated, food was distributed unequally across the country, with officialdom and Pyongyang in particular maintaining privileged access. Some provinces were cut off from grain supplies from the state-run public distribution system altogether. Once the government appealed for help in , the humanitarian community - more experienced with dealing with cooperative governments or even failed states - confronted breathtaking obstacles thrown up by the "hard" North Korean state.

In essence, the regime holds its population hostage to the humanitarian values of the international community. The World Food Programme WFP and other relief groups had to negotiate astonishing terms for entry, even as people were dying, and more than a decade later, they remain tightly constrained in their access and activities. Some commentators that argue that this aid, channeled through the state-controlled public-distribution system, simply props up the regime - that itself constitutes the root of the problem. Yet withholding aid by some donors is unlikely to change the behaviour of such a regime and in any event could be offset by other parties, which has, in fact, occurred.

Famine in North Korea: Markets, Aid and Reform

The North Korean state's failure to provide and its insistence on practices that degraded the effectiveness of the aid programme forced households and other small-scale social units to pursue a variety of coping strategies. Markets began to develop as families engaged in income-earning activities, sold assets, bartered and traded for food. Work units also engaged in similar activities, even stripping assets to barter for food in China.

Just as with the expansion of domestic markets, foreign trade across the Chinese border initially reflected a process of crisis-driven adjustment. These activities began a process of informal marketisation of the economy from below, with potentially profound implications for the society.

Ironically, the very laxity of the aid-monitoring system and the potentially astronomical rents that could be realised by the diversion and sale of aid acted as an additional "lubricant" to encourage the development of markets. Jasper Becker, " A gulag with nukes: David Wall, " North Korea and the 'six-party talks': Peter Hayes, " Nuclear little brother: North Korea's next test " 21 July The critical issue is how the government has reacted to these developments.

Account Options

Does it try to regularise the market economy and deepen it, or does it try to control or even reverse the process? The government's stance has been ambivalent. Although it may seem counterintuitive, for a country like North Korea, with relatively little arable land and inauspicious conditions for growing food, the long-run solution to the food problem is to export minerals and manufactures, and import bulk grains - just like its neighbours China, South Korea, and Japan do.

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The expansion of trade and the growth of foreign investment with China are signs that this process is beginning. Yet the government appears to fear greater openness, and its actions have been tentative and contradictory. During the past two years, the government has undertaken reforms to facilitate foreign investment, yet at the same time it has acted recklessly with respect to the food economy. In , the regime banned the private market in grain - through which most households actually get their food - expelled some NGOs and greatly restricted the activities of the WFP.

Confiscatory seizures of grain during the harvest cycle set the stage for fall of output, or at least measured output, during the harvest cycle as the farmers adopted their own coping strategies in response to state predation. As we predicted at the time, these actions put North Korea on a trajectory for a possible humanitarian crisis in the spring of Now the World Food Programme claims that North Korea is one million metric tons short of grain and that millions will go hungry if the level of humanitarian aid is not increased.

Some observers argue that the situation is not as bad as portrayed by the WFP. Fragmentary and imperfectly observed grain-price data suggest that the prices in the revived markets are fairly stable, not skyrocketing as one might expect in an emergency.

But this divergence of views simply underlines a fundamental and ongoing problem, namely that the North Korean government systematically denies access and impedes the rational assessment of the situation and the design of an appropriate response. If this is how North Korea treats aid workers, how might it treat nuclear-weapons inspectors? The North Korean government has demonstrated that it is prepared to act with startling ruthlessness in the pursuit of its core political goals.

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