A SHORT HISTORY OF THE NORTH KOREAN FAMINE
Surrounded on all sides by leading global economic powers, North Koreans endured one of the worst famines in the last years of the twentieth century. Arguably, North Korea suffered in silence for many years before 1995 (the year most commonly identified as the start of the famine), when a series of natural disasters devastated crops and the government requested international assistance. Since that time scholars and defectors alike report that the famine was in fact well under way by the mid-1990s, that North Korea used the floods as an explanation for the food shortage. The flooding did cause extensive damage, but when aid agencies gained entry to the country, they saw medical evidence of severe malnutrition that predated the floods. In fact, several agencies confirmed malnutrition rates in North Korea as among the highest in the world. The famine changed North Korea through the loss of roughly 5 percent of the population, the migration of at least 30,000–50,000 people out of the country, and the numbers who died as a result of punishments for coping strategies.
In some ways, the North Korean case resembles famines typical to periods prior to the twentieth century in the sense that they were triggered by natural disasters that left communities without enough food to survive.1 While the view that famines are caused by natural disasters was still popular until the 1970s, in contemporary times, technical and infrastructure advances eliminate climate alone as a sufficient cause for famine, regardless of where it occurs. Increased capability of governments and international institutions can predict and respond to impending crises, so when famines do occur nowadays, prevention was always a possibility.2 The famine in North Korea could have been avoided if the government had made certain choices, but many of these choices were antithetical to the political system.
North Korea’s famine was caused by multiple factors: loss of Soviet bloc trade partners; bad agricultural reforms; broken, outdated, and irreparable equipment; unsustainable farming practices; natural disasters; insistence on self-reliance (Juche ideology); and mismanagement of aid and international assistance. The strict control of population coping methods by restricting migration and the cracking down on black markets and private plots probably led to more starvation deaths. In other respects, lack of free information flows inside the country led to misinformation about what had caused the famine and how best to deal with it. This delayed many people’s timely response to the famine. What happened in North Korea has been described as a “priority regime” famine resulting from malevolent government and incompetent exercise of state power.3 Similar cases have been identified in Ethiopia, Sudan, and Malawi and less well-known cases in Madagascar, Iraq, and Bosnia. There may still be technical failures in these instances, but the main problems are asymmetrically skewed toward political failure of local, national, and international response and accountability.
If the North Korean government sought any historical council on their decision making about the famine, they knew that wholesale national collapse was unlikely to result even if they deprioritized relief. Advisors within the government could have reassured the leadership that famines historically have never led to successful revolt or overthrow of state power, and they would have been correct. The leadership may have known that it is not when crises are at the worst that rebellions arise but just before or after. They may have known that preexisting social inequalities map the prognosis for increased inequality in times of famine, that the politically marginalized and economically impoverished are two features throughout history that distinguish those most adversely affected. In North Korea, these groups were preselected for nutritional inequality long before the famine anyway. Indeed, the habitus of North Koreans typically normalized nutritional inequality. Since famines rarely impact more than 5 percent of a population, they have not resulted in whole or even partial changes in political leadership anywhere.4 What the North Korean leadership needed to be most mindful of was the period preceding and following the worst years of the famine. As Victor Cha observed, it is not when things are at their worst but when things begin to improve that the chances for social change arise.5
While it is wishful thinking to imagine that the North Korean famine would lead to political unrest or significant government changes, it was the first time since its early history that a potential threat to national sovereignty emerged from within, and in this respect it was a sensitive period. The famine was never presumed to bring collapse, but it brought a host of opportunities for the seed of dissatisfaction to take root. As a result, it was necessary for North Korea to cope the way socialist countries, long accustomed to hunger, had in the past. Punishments for natural responses to scarcity such as internal migration, crime, and vocalized complaints were dealt with harshly during the 1990s. Punishment for crimes such as theft, speaking freely, and border crossing were meted out on the level of life and death. In fact, the well-worn history of socialist hunger may have been the prescription North Korean used to draft its own solutions.
North Korea’s famine was not a sudden event; rather, it was a process and the tail end of long-term vulnerability with multiple causal factors, such as a combination of agricultural reforms, natural disasters, and the socialist system, that provided the context for the “slow-moving” 1990s famine to emerge and progress.6 Thus, multiple factors led to the economic crisis and food shortages becoming famine.7 Between 200,000 and 1.5 million people died in the famine, but these figures are clearly very rough estimates. Low estimates represent North Korean government figures while high estimates are those of aid agencies; the former is not transparent in its information gathering while the latter are restricted by the North Korean government in their in-country information gathering.8 No source offers a truly accurate picture of the famine’s impact. Compounding these already complicated estimates is the number of people who suffered from famine-related disease and the people who died from punishments for coping strategies that were considered antithetical to the North Korean government.
North Korea’s famine shows signs of entitlement failure not necessarily or only as a theory about the economics of famine processes but also in terms of politics and power.9 Actually, it is not possible to speak of a failure of entitlement in North Korea but rather of “conditional entitlement,” where a person is entitled to food on the condition that he demonstrates political loyalty. Several revolutions also played a role in normalizing inequality and preparing the people for vulnerability to food shortage. The ideological revolution involved the reeducation of peasants to put collective interests above personal ones. The technological revolution entailed irrigation, electrification, mechanization, and chemicalization. The cultural revolution necessitated upgrading the peasantry in terms of knowledge and skill. Added to this was scientific farming, and—like other high-modernist reforms10—a tendency to disregard traditional farming methods followed. Collectively, these revolutionary goals were seen to ensure the nation’s food self-sufficiency and the population’s loyalty to the state.11
Official sources report that Kim Il-Sung first shared the idea of Juche, the official state idea of North Korea, publicly on December 28, 1955, while making a speech to workers entitled “On Eliminating Dogmatism and Formalism and Establishing Juche in Ideological Work.” The goal of the Juche Idea is to achieve independence in politics, economics, and military defense and to unify the peninsula under the Juche Idea. From the beginning, the Juche Idea was applied to daily life, from agricultural techniques to international relations. The analogy of human anatomy was used to educate the population about the Juche Idea.12 The brain makes decisions (the Great Leader), the nervous system carries out those decisions (the Party), and the bones and muscle execute the orders (the people). The body and the nervous system are the population while the head is the leadership.13 The Juche Idea requires loyalty of the people to the leadership.
The national deterioration in food production in the absence of additional imports resulted in food balance deterioration. As early as 1991 the North Korean government launched a gastronomic reform called the “Let’s Eat Only Two Meals a Day” campaign.14 Opting against choices such as opening to the international community and thus potentially losing control of its population, North Korea chose to reduce public consumption of food directly. The famine was already in motion, and only policies ideologically antithetical to the North Korean government could have changed things at this point; nevertheless the Two Meals a Day campaign was intensified. In July 2002 the government announced new measures in agricultural policy whereby state farm workers and members of production cooperatives were permitted to farm greater amounts of land. With respect to these changes, China is a likely influence. In some areas, individual families were allocated land from the assets of the production cooperatives, though we cannot be sure exactly which areas were allocated.15 At the same time, the government ended rationing of rice, corn, and other basic foodstuffs, and consumer prices for these and other products were markedly increased. Wages, to a lesser extent, were also raised, but for many people the prices of foodstuffs were so high as to make money nearly useless.16 In the early 2000s in North Korea, state consumer prices were hyperinflated and markets for all types of products have expanded nationwide. To some this indicated that the centrally planned economy of North Korea was dissolving.17
In the 1980s North Korea struggled with a lack of energy. The energy infrastructure of the economy received a blow early in the 1990s with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Chinese shift to demanding payment for supplies in hard currency. In 1990 North Korea imported about 2.5 million tons of crude oil from the Soviet Union, China, and Iran.18 By 1993 crude oil imports plummeted to one-tenth of what they had been at the start of the 1990s. Given that 100 percent of oil in North Korea is imported, this decline had a major impact on transport and other sectors of the economy, including agriculture. Normal commercial exports collapsed with the end of the Soviet era.19 In 1994–1995 China again reduced its exports to North Korea concurrently at a time of high world prices, making it too expensive for North Korea to import on commercial terms.20
The loss of trading partners from the former Soviet bloc adversely impacted the economy by reducing North Korea’s access to imports. This became increasingly significant in the coming decade as it was more and more difficult to raise enough hard currency at a time when barter was crucial, although North Korea did manage to survive. With the breakup of the bloc, the Soviet Union and then its successor, Russia, demanded payment for the oil at prevailing market rates and in hard currency.21
Investment through trade with the Soviet bloc had already been on the decline; before the collapse, replacements to modernize industrial plants, machinery, infrastructure, and vehicles were long overdue.22 Keep in mind that although North Korea benefited from investments from the USSR and China in the 1950s, along with huge investments of European machinery in 1973 and 1974 (which was never paid for), by the 1990s North Korea was still using this same outdated equipment with no spare parts, and was still relying on these same—now inadequate—investments.
The northeastern part of North Korea took the brunt of the loss of Soviet export markets. Given the resulting squeeze on the economy, the population was forced into precarious dependence on the limited, marginal land available. In mountainous provinces such as Ryanggang, North Hamgyong, and South Hamgyong, this proved a major challenge.23 These regions had been the main source of the country’s industrial base in steel, chemicals, and fertilizers. Foreign import collapse created devastation in these regions, which were also completely dependent on the now increasingly defunct Public Distribution System (PDS).24
According to North Korean defectors, in the past farmers in certain areas were ordered to grow opium poppies.25 North Koreans I interviewed reported that there were opium and tobacco plantations in the northern regions during the 1990s famine. North Korea cultivates approximately 4,000 to 7,000 hectares of opium poppy, which equates to a production of about 30 to 44 metric tons of opium gum annually.26 More recent studies show that lack of currency is driving the export of drugs, that drugs are being used to dull hunger pains, and that drug use among military officials is widespread.27
Food substitution is still seen in North Korea even during contemporary times: the BBC reported that North Korea has developed a “special noodle” which keeps one feeling full longer.28 Ersatz food has appeared in socialism systems before.29 This is a feature of the shortage phenomena of classical socialist systems.30 Postponement is another characteristic, the belief that particular services, such as the delivery of food or health care, will come about later.31
In North Korea the procurement of grain rests on an exchange between the government and farmers. Farmers surrender grain at prices well below what they could command in the market, and they receive food and other consumer items in return. The North Korean government at the time of the famine was severely impaired in its ability to uphold its end of the bargain because of declines in the economy.32 At the same time, promises to increase wages were also unfulfilled.33 The government could not provide fertilizer and other agricultural supplies, so the exchange with farmers became more and more one-sided. According to Haggard and Noland, “the surrender of grain to the government no doubt looked more and more like a one-sided deal or confiscatory tax.”34 The farmers naturally had a strong incentive to protect themselves. In the summer of 1996 many farmers secretly harvested crops before they could be taken by the central government.35
The North Korean famine of the 1990s has its roots in the economic and political systems of the country, which has led some scholars to believe that regime change is necessary for current shortages to be resolved.36 In the past, experts considered the main causes of the agricultural crisis in North Korea to be floods, low incentive to work, little investment, Juche farming methods, and ineffective use of fertilizer.37 Taken in combination, the agricultural crisis, the economic decline of North Korea, the PDS, and vulnerability in terms of entitlement relations with the state all help to explain how the famine arose and continues to plague the country. In 2004 the Good Friends nongovernmental organization (NGO) asked defectors which reforms they felt were most needed in North Korea; the majority answered that the cooperative farms, the PDS, and the regulation of the market needed to be abolished.
As the food crisis worsened, the political and administrative system, while appearing centralized and hierarchical, decentralized to some extent. As a consequence, local authorities at provincial levels had to coordinate supply with the demand for food, and this led to an increase in local officials’ influence in the distribution of food in their areas.38 People’s committees controlled county-level warehouses and played important roles in the collection of food, transmitting targets, supervising grain collection in jurisdictions, and allocating food to retail sites (public distribution centers).
The official means by which food has been and is still today distributed inside North Korea is the PDS. The PDS is said to have subsidized food rations to approximately 13.5 million North Koreas, roughly 62 percent of the population.39 Access to food depends principally upon access to distributions from the state; however, people have increasingly learned to diversify their sources of food acquisition. Limited access to food through legal or illegal means, rather than aggregates of food production alone, creates greater vulnerability. Thus, legal and affordable access to food beyond the state distribution system would secure livelihoods. In North Korea more than 60 percent of the population depends entirely on the PDS, and the majority of those people live in urban areas, where alternative methods of accessing food such as foraging, market-selling, trading, and so on, are limited. This would indicate that those in urban areas have experienced higher levels of vulnerability.
Entitlement to the PDS is based on factors other than need. Even if one has access to the PDS, the amount is often distributed unequally.40 As Sue Lautze has argued, access to state-supplied food in the form of domestic produce, imports, or aid is “strictly determined by one’s status, with key military units, government officials and urban residents always outranking peasant farmers. In sum, the more important an individual is to the state, the better treated his family will be.”41 Since the late 1990s, access to food is increasingly made through markets, though people who lack sufficient funds cannot get adequate food through these routes.
According to research conducted by the then Korean Buddhist Sharing Movement (also known as Good Friends), when they asked former North Koreans about the approximate date when food distribution stopped, answers varied widely: 13 percent of respondents answered it was 1992 or before while the greatest numbers, 32.3 percent and 28.2 percent, reported the PDS stopped in 1994 and 1995, respectively; only 5.4 percent reported the PDS stopped in 1996 or after.42 Reports about the continuance or failure of the PDS appear in defector accounts throughout the 2000s and continue to vary at present writing. Aid programs such as the World Food Program and other agencies are required to deliver food through the PDS to local communities. The existence of the system is not in doubt, nor is its capacity to sufficiently supply the country; however, the continuance of the PDS into the future is in question.
The famine in North Korea provides clear evidence that inequality is a preexisting norm within the society. The allocation of rations followed complex systems of occupation and age-related stratification, delivered by the PDS, which had its initial break down, but not official collapse, in the 1990s.43 Entitlements to food, access to education, type of employment, and residence were all determined by the “perceived political reliability” of individuals, and these differences in entitlement have influenced mortality rates.44 Since the purges of the 1950s, the Korean Workers’ Party has undertaken a succession of efforts to investigate the class background of the population and to classify individuals in terms of their political reliability. As a result, members of the so-called hostile classes were relocated to remote parts of the country—parts of the country that have been off-limits to external monitoring by relief organizations.45 These membership categories are said to have had powerful indirect effects on access to food, and class positions had important implications for residence location. The top ranks of the political class were also centrally rather than generally supplied, receiving their rations through the Party or special supplies within the government.46 So this class might be less aware of what was going on in famine areas. The distribution of food reflected quite openly the basic principles of stratification in the socialist system. At the top of the hierarchy of entitlements were the military and special security forces and high-ranking government officials.47 Two groups fell outside the scope of the PDS—namely, workers on state farms who relied on PDS for only six months of a year and those on cooperative farms; both of these groups could keep some of the grain they harvested.48
With rationing coupons, North Koreans “purchase” items from within the PDS. Black markets (jangmadang) offer the chance to purchase items with cash, but at hugely inflated prices. Because access to food and other ration items are officially acquired through the PDS, it is one of the primary means of controlling and monitoring the population. The top ranks of the political class were centrally supplied, receiving their rations through the Party or special supplies reserved for the government. The military maintained its own distribution system, the provisions bureau, under the general services bureau of the ministry of the people’s armed forces supplied rations to military units, managing the military’s energy war stockpiles of food and fuel.49 In 1996, in a talk he gave at Kim Il-Sung University, Kim Jong-Il stated that the military was not immune to food shortages and hunger. He urged farmers to avoid stealing from farms and urged the public to be conservative in its consumption so that the military would have enough.50 There was of course the need for food to be transferred more fairly, but the reason why it was not done so was because of unequal relations of power.51 The distribution of international relief supplies is said to be contingent on political loyalty or economic utility rather than need.52 In order to limit the threat of influence posed by the international community, constraints were put on international humanitarian workers. While these constraints went so far as to contravene operational considerations of some of the humanitarian organizations themselves, the main goal was to ensure control of the flow of information, people, and objects within the country. For example, aid workers were denied access to about 25 percent of the country, representing about 15 percent of the population. “There was no way of assessing the needs—if any—of the people in these areas, although the general consensus was that conditions were unlikely to be any better than those in accessible areas.” Areas that were once accessible became inaccessible, and vice versa, for “no clear reason.”53 Additionally, because access to official information and data was difficult, and if available at all it was of questionable reliability, it was virtually impossible to determine if the aid was having any positive impact. Morton writes:
Agencies were not permitted to conduct random monitoring of programmes or spot checks, which are the normal means to determine that aid is properly used. National security overrides every other consideration in the DPRK. If there was a choice between external aid and national security, there was no contest: national security would automatically prevail. This was why certain parts of the country were off-limits. This was why information was restricted. Even giving us a list of beneficiary institutions was perceived to have national security implications.54
Communications were also strictly controlled for reasons of national security: long-distance radio communications or satellite phones as well as normal communication operating equipment for UN agencies and NGOs were not permitted. In addition, the use of an emergency international air ambulance service to provide emergency medical evacuation was not guaranteed permission to land in Pyongyang.55 NGO and UN staff was monitored all the time by a minder provided by the government. The application of this type of control is not particular to foreigners; this degree of control is also applied to North Koreans themselves, or to other visitors to the country, including academics. However, this type of control severely limited the access to information, thus complicating assessment of need in those places where permission to work was granted and, worse, sometimes totally eliminating the possibility for assessment.
It is perhaps unfair to doubt the extent of difficulty involved in trying to establish and maintain humanitarian work in North Korea, both for the foreign agencies and for the government itself, which views foreign agencies as a threat to its national sovereignty. There are problems with roads, energy supplies, and basic resources for the delivery of aid, so it is not a surprise that there would be delays and added confusion with language and translation—particularly as it would all be on the North Korean side. Korean-speaking foreign aid workers were not permitted in North Korea during the 1990s famine.56 This stipulation seems to have relaxed since then. In the past the linguistic helplessness of aid workers in North Korea contributed to the isolation of the people. The largely monolingual society has no means of interacting with the international community on a direct level—and any interaction is mediated through interpreters and strictly supervised. The linguistic powerlessness of aid workers in North Korea is part of an obvious, deliberate, and sustained effort at control.
The North Korean government acted as the final arbitrator on the needs of its citizens, often using food toward its self-determined ends. The fact that North Korea put political loyalty over humanitarian need in determining who did and did not receive aid resulted in the cessation of operations by NGOs such as Care International, Oxfam, Action against Hunger, Doctors without Borders, and Doctors of the World. However, after speaking with a doctor who worked in North Korea with Doctors without Borders, it seems that individual morals were compromised and this also became untenable. The bystander anxiety that Hugo Slim writes about may not have been uncommon given such conditions—compassion for North Koreans amid powerlessness to take necessary action, frustration, anger, and fear caused many humanitarian workers and NGOs to withdraw from North Korea.57
Grain shipments were triaged so that stocks were sent out to some areas but not others. The east coast was particularly limited in terms of food distribution, especially late in 1995. From the start of the relief effort, the government focused relief and monitoring on the west coast, insisting that food be delivered through the main west coast port of Namp’o despite the fact that the transportation system linking the west and east had broken down.
Contributions in the form of fertilizers, improved irrigation systems, reliable electricity, and expanded use of agricultural facilities and equipment have helped to bolster agricultural output. Among international donors, South Korea still gives massive amounts of food aid to North Korea. However, during the mid-1990s the North Korean government stipulated that aid from South Korea would only be accepted if it came in unmarked bags, ensuring that international aid would not bring with it an awareness of the international community for North Korean citizens. Between 1995 and 2012 the South Korea government provided $1.36 billion in aid to North Korea. Private aid to North Korea from the South was nearly another $800 million. Aid contributions from the United States in the form of energy assistance, food aid, and medicine have exceeded $1.3 billion since the United States started providing aid in 1995.58
In 1998 eighteen nutritionists from UNICEF, WFP, and the European Commission for Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection (ECHO), in collaboration with the North Korean government, measured the height and weight of more than 1,500 children aged six months to seven years. The report indicated that 62 percent of the children suffered from chronic malnutrition (based on height for age) and 16 percent were acutely malnourished (based on weight for height). In a joint press release, the agencies underlined that “this puts North Korea among the top 10 countries with the highest malnutrition rates in the world.”59 This suggests that the problems had been long in the making, as assessments on stunting retroactively assess conditions of famine. Military grain stockpiles ranged from 400,000 metric tons to as high as 1.5 million metric tons. That is said to be 5 percent to 20 percent of normal annual demand.60 The government could have drawn on these, but those I interviewed said that they did not, which suggests that shortages were a function of distribution more than aggregate supply.61
Nearly a decade after the famine began to take shape, aid agencies were still not given full and independent access to the population, and there is little systematic information about the famine.62 For instance, the World Food Programme in 2008 and 2009 still only had access to 131 counties. There are still entire areas about which aid agencies have no knowledge whatsoever. The information that they do have, and their means of distribution, are morally questionable. As Scott Snyder and Gordon Flake explain, the “amount of food distributed through the PDS is no longer an indicator of imminent distress within the North Korean system, yet it has remained the WFP’s primary indicator of distress.”63 Fiona Terry, a researcher for Doctors Without Borders, wrote in the Guardian that by distributing food through the PDS, their relief operations have become part of the system of oppression.64
A decline in international food availability, combined with a supply of external sources, can be identified as a new kind of entitlement problem.65 Commercial imports of food fell as humanitarian assistance arrived, and the savings created by this were allocated to other resources. Therefore, the 1995 food problem cannot be attributed to decline in domestic food availability alone; rather, the famine developed and worsened as a result of a failure to adjust imports and military expenditures according to the needs of the population. This failure provides clear evidence to evaluate the government’s reaction to consequent suffering and deaths during the famine. The regime faced two basic options: the country could either reduce domestic consumption to bring it into line with shrinking domestic supplies, or it could relieve the domestic supply constraints by importing food from abroad. The latter strategy could be achieved through three non-mutually exclusive means: increasing exports to pay for needed imports, sustaining the ability to borrow on commercial terms, or seeking foreign aid.66
Every step of the way, the WFP and other aid agencies had to negotiate with the North Korean government about every aspect of aid distribution within the country. At the time of the 1990s famine, the humanitarian effort sought to target its assistance to vulnerable groups inside North Korea, such as children, pregnant and nursing women, and the elderly; these priority groups were to be monitored closely. The North Korean government placed roadblocks in the way of donor activities, making them unable to achieve certain objectives. Because donors were unable to track food donations from port to final consumer, the true benefit of these activities cannot be assessed.67 The socialist system, in order to maintain power, requires a high threshold of control over the interaction between the population and the international community. However, in this instance it seems that the primary objective of control was the politically unreliable portions of the population that had already been relocated to inhospitable areas of the country, and to the most difficult jobs, or to the most arduous prison camps, in the decades leading up to the famine.
The limitations placed on the international community in North Korea were not only influenced by the run-down infrastructure of the country, which could hardly manage to distribute the foreign aid, but were also ideological. The aid workers were restricted in the locations where they delivered aid and the routes they took to deliver it. They were also linguistically isolated from the North Korean staff with which they worked and the population to whom they delivered the aid. While this has changed in recent years, it is still not possible for aid workers to speak openly and freely with aid recipients.
As Johan Pottier has shown in Kigali, regimes know how to make use of the empathy and guilt that exists in the international aid community. International aid organizations’ preferences for authorities’ “easy reading” of complex situations have led them to operate according to the authorities’ “seal of approval.”68 Many UN officials misread the signals and expressed doubts about the credibility of refugee accounts of the famine. The same misreading occurred elsewhere. “Pentagon analysts looked at satellite photographs and saw none of the signs familiar from African famines, mass graves and hordes of refugees.”69 Migration is one of the most natural responses to famine when other means of survival are proving insufficient. The lack of large-scale migration from North Korea might have been misinterpreted as a sign that the famine was not severe, that the relief efforts within the country were sufficient, or that other coping strategies were working, rather than that the government was controlling migration on a physical as well as an ideological level.
The severity of famine is an issue of numbers for some in the international community. With access to many areas impossible, analysts have few options but to resort to what is known of other famines, but it is a fallacy to expect that famine will manifest in the same ways in different places, particularly when we recognize that famine can come about through different causal factors, can be met with different responses, and can be contained in different ways by the country in which it emerges. Where assessments of famine have been made using satellite images, as in North Korea, the reliability of such images needs to be addressed. Reliance on satellite photos to diagnose famine—in terms of refugee flows and mass graves—is a highly unreliable technique. Reliance on satellite photos to disprove famine is almost immoral.
In the best of cases, photos can only be used as a complementary tool to substantiate allegations of atrocities. As one expert on international conflicts and remote sensing explained, you need to know where and when to look.70 In addition, satellite imagery can only pick up on relatively large groups, not individuals. Where refugees are concerned, most of the information is gathered from what is left behind in the wake of refugee flows, such as tents, paths, cars, and campfires—in other words, circumstantial evidence. For this evidence to be picked up on satellite, the background must have an exceptionally contrasting effect. In the case of North Korea, we do not have large convoys of refugees heading toward the Chinese border. Pitching a tent or lighting a campfire is out of the question if successful defection is the objective. Border crossers leave no sign of their passage that could attract the attention of soldiers or border guards. Sometimes mass graves can indicate the extent of famine, or prison camps, for example, but trying to disprove the existence of these through satellite images cannot be done with certainty. In order to determine the possibility of mass graves, areas need to be forest- and mountain-free so analysts of satellite images can look at various images of an identical location—before and after the event—and determine whether soil has been turned.
Numerous national disasters contributed to the famine.71 With arable land in short supply, insistence on self-sufficiency proved lethal. This is nothing unexpected because “socialist governments that pursue policies of self-sufficiency limit their capacity to purchase food and frequently fail to avail themselves of international assistance as well. As a result, they effectively deny their citizens entitlements just as clearly as more localized entitlements or political contract failures do.”72 Some agriculture techniques increased North Korea’s vulnerability to natural disasters.
The 1990s started with general declines in agricultural production and the economy. Given the unpromising objective conditions in the agricultural sector, such as the hilly terrain, the northerly latitude, a high ratio of population to arable land, and the short growing seasons, the achievement of production goals required maximization of yields through the heavy application of chemical fertilizers and other agricultural chemicals as well as a reliance on electrically powered irrigation systems. Continuous cropping led to soil depletion and the overuse of ammonium sulfate as a nitrogen fertilizer contributed to acidification of the soil and, eventually, a reduction in yields. As yields declined, hillsides were denuded, which brought more and more marginal land into production. This contributed to soil erosion, river silting, and, ultimately, catastrophic flooding. Isolation from the outside world has also meant that the genetic diversity of North Korean seeds have declined, making plants more vulnerable to disease.73
A severe cold front hit in 1993, and when it hit Northeast Asia, it caused 10–30 percent yield damage in northeast China and South Korea. It clearly also adversely affected North Korean crops (although we do not know to what extent). Meanwhile, North Korea had already been experiencing food shortages for several years. The floods helped to speed the crisis—already well under way—to its nadir. The floods also provided an alibi for the North Korean government to save face while requesting outside help. It is generally accepted that North Korea would have experienced a famine with or without the floods that came in 1995 and 1996. Deforestation meant that land was swept away when the floods came in 1995 and 1996. After the floods, “15% of arable land was destroyed, with the incidence of flooding being higher on high-quality land (28%) than on medium- and low-quality land (13%).”74 The international community was alerted to the humanitarian crisis in the mid-1990s. At that time, the floods offered a convenient decoy to the myriad causes for the famine. According to North Korea, 5.4 million people were displaced, 330,000 hectares of agricultural land washed away, 1.9 million tons of grain lost, and the total cost of flood damages reached $15 billion.
Despite the tight restrictions placed on relief activities, the evidence for chronic malnutrition and a slow-moving famine were discernible to aid agencies on the ground. This might also suggest that the impact of malnutrition had become so pervasive and ordinary in North Korea that these signs had become largely invisible. In terms of infrastructure and economic development, North Koreans fared better than their brethren in the South for about two decades after the division of the Korean Peninsula. However, recent research shows that there is evidence that North Koreans were poorly off in nutrition even in those early decades. Studies with refugees reveal significant discrepancies in height, with those born after 1948 significantly shorter than those born prior to the division, and this discrepancy became greater over time, peeking in the 1980s.75 Although North Korea did have a more advanced health care system in the 1960s and 1970s, this is not reflected in increased height of North Koreans because their diet was low in quality and quantity. The food shortages and eventual famine were so gradual that adjusting to these difficulties took place over generations, resulting in both demographic and cultural changes.
Kim Jong-Il formulated a connection between subsistence rights of the collective and the right to national self-determination stating: “National self-determination and independence from foreign rule is a fundamental pre-condition to the realization of the nation’s subsistence rights and development.”76 North Korea continues to suffer with food shortages and it continues to prioritize national well-being over the welfare of its population.77