The Hidden People of North Korea (24 page)

The WFP has frequently argued with the North Korean government about how to keep track of donated food in order to ensure that it goes to the deserving poor. WFP monitors are required to put in a travel request a week or more in advance before making a trip outside of Pyongyang, thus giving local officials plenty of time to prepare for the visit and set the stage for whatever play they want to perform—whether to make things look bad in the hope of getting more aid or good to indicate that progress is being made. Monitors are accompanied by North Korean security cadres, and the WFP is generally not permitted to bring Korean-speaking aid workers into the country, presumably for fear they will learn too much about North Korean society. Aid workers must therefore rely on North Korean government translators to speak with the people, and needless to say, no North Korean is going to speak candidly in the presence of a government official. To someone unfamiliar with North Korea, these government restrictions might seem extraordinary, but the WFP dares not object too strongly for fear of being prevented from delivering any food aid at all.

Much of the donated food is transported by the military, the only organization with sufficient fuel and operating trucks to move large amounts of goods around the country. At every step of the way, beginning at dockside, military and party organizations have the opportunity to siphon off some of the aid for their own consumption or to sell in the markets, but it is not known how much of the aid is diverted. Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland, who have provided a balanced and well-researched view of North Korea’s food situation, cite estimates that 10 to 30 percent of the aid is not making it to its intended destination.
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On numerous occasions the WFP has vigorously denied that significant amounts of food are being diverted, but in the absence of a more rigorous monitoring system, this defense lacks credibility. Staff from other aid organizations, which find it impossible to insist on stricter monitoring while the bigger WFP accepts the Kim regime’s restrictions, have been anonymously quoted as taking a more pessimistic view of the diversion situation. One says, “Everything is a lure and a facade here!” Another says, “We still don’t have a minimal degree of transparency.”
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One policy that the WFP has firmly adhered to is to distribute aid only to areas where it is possible to send monitors. This means that large swaths of North Korea, primarily in the East and Northeast, have never received WFP aid because the North Korean authorities refuse to let monitors visit those areas, ostensibly for security reasons. In an attempt to discourage diversion of food aid to the wealthier classes, the WFP has substituted corn and other less desirable grains for rice, on the principle that only poor people would be willing to eat those grains, although unscrupulous people could still sell the grains in the markets.

In late 2004, the North Korean government placed further restrictions on food monitoring, explaining, implausibly, that local residents found the monitoring trips too “intrusive,” whereupon the WFP reduced its food distributions by 20 to 30 percent. In October 2005, the North Korean government requested that the WFP close its local food factories, suspend its food distribution, and send its workers home by the end of November, claiming that there was now enough food coming in from domestic and other foreign sources (presumably directly from South Korea and China). At the same time, the government said it would welcome “development-oriented” assistance.
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Most other aid organizations received the same expulsion notice.

In November 2005, Kim Young-hoon of the (North) Korea Rural Economic Institute told the ROK minister of unification that if South Korea continued to deliver food aid for one or two more years, the North would then be able to “resolve the food issue.”
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Worse than wishful thinking, this was a lie. The WFP and other NGOs pleaded with the North Korean government to let them stay, and foreign human rights activists criticized the Kim regime for its wanton disregard of people’s needs, prompting the regime to assert that choosing
not
to receive humanitarian aid was its “sovereign right” and insisting that the government “has a way to overcome its difficulties, as they are temporary.”
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However, as the 2005 harvest (which was indeed somewhat larger than in previous years) was consumed, reports of hunger surfaced, and the regime was forced to relent. After lengthy negotiations, the WFP was permitted to return to North Korea in May 2006 with a dramatically scaled-down program.
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We can only guess at the calculations that went into the decision to expel NGOs from North Korea. A decision of this magnitude could only be made by Kim Jong-il, and it is quite possible that his agriculture officials mislead him about the food situation. The year 2005 was officially designated as the year of agriculture, and even if the officials knew better, they might have been reluctant to admit to Kim that their campaign had come up short. After all, only a few years earlier Kim had ordered that his agriculture minister be publicly executed for failing to deliver sufficient crops. Another possibility is that the North Korean military, which draws most of its food from domestic stocks, might have objected to the foreign aid monitors and pressured Kim to throw them out. Or perhaps the expulsion and readmission were simply ploys to force the WFP and other aid organizations to be more responsive to North Korean demands for reduced monitoring.

The Kims, father and son, have addressed the perennial food shortages in their own ways, relying on their intuition and on the advice of homegrown agricultural experts who recommend solutions consistent with the principles of the command socialist economy. Under Kim Jong-il’s rule, a four-prong attack on food shortages has been mounted. In a continuation of his father’s enthusiasm for creating more usable farmland, the younger Kim has emphasized “large-scale land rezoning” designed to combine smaller fields into larger ones suitable for mechanized agriculture, despite the lack of such machinery. Kim also pushed the “potato revolution,” the “seed revolution” (developing or importing seeds suitable for North Korea’s growing conditions), and the “two-crops-a-year farming policy” (typically corn and wheat in cooler weather and rice in the summer).
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None of these initiatives has materially increased the annual harvests, suggesting that the agricultural problem lies elsewhere.

Kim Jong-il must suspect that the key to improving harvests will be found in agricultural management, a perennial concern of socialist economists. One issue is how to “correctly combine the unified guidance of the state with the creative initiative at each unit” (to borrow North Korea’s words).
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Favorite prescriptions include injunctions to “rationally deploy” farming resources and pursue “farming-at-the-right-place” and “farming-at-the-right-time.” A second management problem concerns how to employ incentives, a perennial issue (discussed earlier) that the North Korean media discuss in the context of determining the “scientifically correct” combination of political, moral, and material incentives to use. Arguably the greatest boon to North Korean agriculture is right under Kim Jong-il’s nose, but he either refuses to see it or realizes that it is too dangerous to adopt. The productivity of farmers’ private gardens far surpasses the productivity of the collective and state farm fields. Farmers do not have to be told what seeds to plant in their gardens or when to plant them. That is to say, farmers are using the type of creativity that Kim wants them to use, but they are being creative outside the bounds of socialism, and this is not acceptable to Kim. In short, the most obvious way to increase agricultural production would simply be to give the land back to the farmers, like the Chinese government did beginning in the late 1970s.

The Kim regime holds its people hostage to hunger, and dealing with hostage takers involves making distasteful compromises. Kim obviously cares less about his people’s welfare than do international aid organizations, not just because he is hard-hearted but because he is concerned first and foremost about his own security, which he believes foreigners threaten—thus the strange and unfortunate situation in which food-aid donors must plead to be allowed to continue to feed the North Korean people.

When all is said and done, North Korea remains as dependent as ever on foreign food aid and has manipulated the international community in order to continue receiving it on the best possible terms. Direct aid from South Korea and China is preferred over aid from the WFP, which is accompanied by more monitoring. The South Korean government under Presidents Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun bristled at the charge that it was not doing enough to track where its donated rice was going, but the numbers speak for themselves. According to a South Korean newspaper, in 2004 only ten South Korean inspections were made of the distribution of over three hundred thousand tons of rice, whereas the WFP made over four thousand spot inspections.
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The same article reported the ROK unification ministry’s explanation: “Because it [rice aid] was given as a loan, we are limited in terms of our participation in the distribution process.”
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This refers to the pretense that some aid is in the form of a loan, despite the fact that nobody expects the loan will ever be repaid. As for China’s aid to North Korea, it is a matter between two secretive communist governments.

Haggard and Noland, in their study of the North Korean economy, have noted that as food aid began to arrive in the mid-1990s, the North Korean government cut back on its purchases of foreign food to the point where over 90 percent of food imports were in the form of aid.
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This action was taken even though the food aid was insufficient to save all North Koreans or bring them back to full health. So, not only does unmonitored bilateral aid seem to be crowding out WFP aid, but aid in general has crowded out commercial imports of food.

What is the Kim regime doing with its money and with its domestic food harvests? Much of the domestic harvest goes to the military, in line with Kim’s “military-first politics,” and a considerable portion of the government’s income goes to the construction of monuments to the Kims. In an internal communication from August 2004, Kim supposedly boasted about how construction proceeded in the DPRK even during the famine period. The projects listed were the Kumsusan Memorial Palace (believed to have cost at least a hundred million dollars), statues, and other commemorative monuments built “for the indoctrination of revolutionary tradition.”
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Reports in 2006 indicate that Kim Jong-il museums are being built throughout the country to supplement the Kim Il-sung museums found in every city, province, and county.
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Health Care

International concern about North Korea’s chronic food shortages obscures another serious threat to the people’s health: their broken health-care system. The system is broken not because of any shortage of qualified medical personnel, although North Korea’s doctors have limited access to cutting-edge medical knowledge, but because the collapse of the economy has deprived medical personnel of equipment and medicines to work with, and malnutrition makes people vulnerable to a host of ailments. After the introduction of the July 2002 economic-management measures, which shifted the burden of living costs to the people, the government promised to continue providing free health care, but descriptions of the health-care system in the North Korean press bear little resemblance to actual conditions.

Workplace accidents are common. Construction work performed with machinery in developed societies is done by hand. Mines are death traps. “Speed battles” force workers to work too quickly under exhausting conditions. A German technical advisor who worked for several foreign aid organizations in North Korea reported that North Korean managers considered adequate safety measures an extravagance, and he noted that in the provinces doctors were forced to amputate the limbs of injured workers because they did not have instruments and medicines for surgical treatment.
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According to a United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) report, as the economy deteriorated during the 1990s, the availability of potable water declined: in 1994, 83 percent of North Koreans had access to piped water, but by 1998 only 53 percent did.
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Without electricity to run pumps, high-rise apartment buildings are without water except during a few hours in the morning and evening. According to a survey conducted by the DPRK government and jointly sponsored by UNICEF and the WFP, only about half of North Korean households have flush toilets.
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Outside of Pyongyang, chlorine to purify drinking water is in short supply, and pumping stations often cannot operate for lack of fuel and spare parts, forcing people to get their water from the nearest stream or river, which is often polluted because waste-treatment plants are not operating.

Since the 1960s, public health care (there is, of course, no legal private care) has taken the form of a “doctor-in-charge” system whereby a general practitioner, an obstetrician, and a pediatrician are assigned to a geographical area or designated workplace comprising about fifteen hundred persons. Patients are first seen in local clinics. More serious cases are supposed to be referred to a local hospital, then up to a county hospital, then to a hospital in the provincial capital, and finally to a hospital in Pyongyang. In fact, none of these medical facilities has adequate medicine or equipment to treat serious cases, except for a few of the Pyongyang hospitals that treat the elite cadres. The most famous of these elite hospitals is the Pyongyang Maternity Hospital, a favorite spot for North Korean officials to take foreign visitors in order to demonstrate the alleged superiority of their health-care system. In 2004, a Korean Central News Agency article reported that Kim Jong-il had sent “scores of tons of wild honey to the hospital on at least 30 occasions,” along with “rare tonics including bear hoof, deer’s placenta paste, black hens and pine-nuts.” This list suggests that even at this hospital, modern (or at least modern Western) medicine is lacking, forcing doctors to resort to more traditional Asian herbal remedies, which in North Korea have come to be called “
Koryo
medicine.”
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Because indigenous (or Chinese-origin) medicine does not rely on foreign research and technology, the Kim regime is especially proud of it, in line with the official ideology of
Juche
, but North Korean doctors are sometimes skeptical of its effectiveness.
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