Politics at the heart of North Korea famine

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): On April 25, Dean R. Hirsch, head of the California-based relief agency World Vision International, returned from a visit to North Korea, where even the secretive Stalinist government admits that 15 percent of children under five are undernourished.

"Unless food aid reaches these children within the next 30 to 60 days," he said, "the future of North Korea is very grim."

Most of that time has now passed, and little has been done. Moreover, the North Korean government was understating the problem. A recent UNICEF survey in Huichon city, north of the capital, Pyongyang, found that 50 percent of the children in the city's nurseries and kindergartens were malnourished.

On May 30, North Korea canceled a barter deal in which it was to exchange 4,000 tons of zinc for 20,000 tons of grain just before the ship carrying the grain entered its waters.

It would have been the first sale of U.S. grain to North Korea since Cargill Inc, the Minnesota-based grains firm, was given permission to bypass the U.S. trade embargo and sell up to half a million tons of wheat and rice to the hungry country. But Pyongyang has already run out of foreign exchange, and now it has run out of zinc as well. "They can't dig up ore because of the floods," said a Tokyo metals trader, "and they don't have enough electric power to supply the zinc refineries."

On June 5, a North Korean patrol boat escorting a fleet of fishing boats (to make sure none of them defect) crossed the boundary into South Korean waters. It was probably just a navigational error, but when a South Korean gunboat came to investigate, the North Korean vessel immediately opened fire.

Nobody was hurt, but the incident underlined the extreme difficulty of dealing with Pyongyang even when the topic is getting food aid to its own starving citizens. So far, little has been achieved, though their food ration is already down to 100 grams (three ounces) of rice a day, about one-fifth of the minimum daily intake for a normal, healthy adult.

Also on June 5, Peter McDermott, UNICEF's deputy director of emergency programs, returned to London from a 10-day visit to North Korea and reported that even that meager 100-gram ration would run out on June 20. At one orphanage he visited, 60 out of 270 children had died in the past year.

Let us consider what is unfolding before our eyes. A country of 25 million people is about to suffer a famine. The harvest is still over three months away, and hundreds of thousands of people may be dead by then unless far more is done to help them. And this country is not in some inaccessible, poverty-stricken corner of the world; it is in the heart of booming East Asia, surrounded by Japan, South Korea, China and Russia.

Yet the situation in North Korea is so desperate that in the mountainous north-east, where conditions are worst, villagers have reportedly been keeping the bodies of deceased relatives at home until they start to rot, to thwart cannibal grave-robbers. And we have known about the famine for months.

True, the North Korean Communist government is a fanatical and paranoid regime that is very hard to deal with, and the Korean peninsula is the scene of the world's biggest remaining military confrontation. But famines rarely occur in sane, well- run places.

China was hardly a sane, well-run place at the end of the 1950s, when Mao launched the 'Great Leap Forward' and an estimated 30 million starved. Ethiopia was neither well-run nor easily accessible when famine struck in 1974-1976, or again in 1984-1986. At least the North Korean regime admits there is a problem and says it wants help. And if the food aid gets there, North Korea still has the infrastructure to get it to the people.

So why are we weeks away from a major famine in north-east Asia, of all places? The answer, of course, is politics.

"One side says there will have to be peace talks before we give food, the other side says you have to give food before we have peace talks -- back and forth, back and forth," said Anthony Hewlett, UNICEF's Bangkok representative, who traveled to North Korea in early May.

The United States and South Korea are refusing massive food aid until North Korea agrees to open serious talks on a permanent peace in the peninsula (there has been only a ceasefire for the past 44 years). Pyongyang is refusing to enter any negotiations until it is guaranteed massive food aid. Neither side seems very concerned about the children who will starve.

It gets incredibly petty. For example, South Korea has promised to ship US$8 million worth of corn, flour, powdered milk and instant noodles to the North by July. After lengthy negotiations, Pyongyang has agreed not to remove the noodles from their foreign-labeled packets before distributing them, but it still resists accepting food labeled as coming from the South Korean Red Cross.

Similarly, Seoul insists that the food must move directly across the inter-Korean frontier at Panmunjom, whereas Pyongyang wants it shipped through a third country to lessen the humiliation of having to accept aid from the enemy. And so it goes.

Catherine Bertini, head of the UN World Food Program, estimates that 1.8 million tons of food aid are needed to avert large-scale starvation in North Korea this summer. So far, the WFP has raised only 144,000 tons of donations (though the European Commission has just volunteered to send another 155,000 tons).

It's a start, but the time is already late and much more is needed. Now is not the time to score points against Kim Jong-il's regime in Pyongyang, however bad it is and however much to blame for ruining the North Korean economy.

At the end of last month, 150 years after the fact, British Prime Minister Tony Blair apologized to Ireland for Britain's failure to send enough help in the potato famine of the late 1840s, when a million Irish died and millions more fled overseas. (Ireland's population is still less than it was in 1845.) It was a welcome gesture, but more than a bit late. Nobody should have to make that kind of apology to Koreans in the future for the way we behaved this year.