Hungry North Koreans should not be penalized

Excerpts of Guardian opinion by Roberta Cohen, non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution:

To attract donors, North Korea will need to devote more of its own resources to agricultural reforms, incentives for food production, ending market restrictions, importing greater quantities of food and improving its deteriorating health structures. Even so, some donors might not be eager to help a country that regularly hurls distasteful epithets and threatens its neighbors and beyond.

The most critical question, however, is whether hungry people should be penalized for the policies of their government. The answer is no. The stunting of children (one out of four under the age of five), high maternal mortality rates and tuberculosis for lack of vitamins and iron should be de-linked from political issues.

But here the case of North Korea presents a dilemma: reaching the needy has often been thwarted by a lack of access and transparency. While donors, UN agencies and NGOs have devised increasingly stringent monitoring conditions, including measuring children’s arms and providing corn soy blends so as not to be diverted to the military or elite, a widely disseminated United Nations report this year found that the government distributes food primarily to persons crucial to the regime, favors certain parts of the country, and avoids structural reforms of agriculture and health care out of fear of losing political control.

It therefore behooves the UN to press North Korea for strengthened monitoring and to link its aid to long term reforms designed to achieve sustainable results. And the UN must broaden its focus beyond traditional donors to China. As North Korea’s principal ally, recent estrangement notwithstanding, China should be urged to join in meeting shortfalls and in adopting international monitoring standards.

 [The Guardian]

Cut off food aid to North Korea entirely or double down?

Excerpts of Guardian opinion by Steven Weber, professor of political science at UC Berkeley:

Societies choose between spending to defend what they have, increasing current consumption, and building for the future. For decades now, the world has been subsidizing North Korea’s choice to invest massively in defense at the expense of both investment and current consumption.

Humanitarian fatigue may not be humanity’s most admirable trait, but it’s a real one and it’s not likely to be reversed unless the North Korean regime delivers something positive on security. And that’s less likely to happen if we keep the regime on slowly diminishing life support.

There are better choices: One would be to cut off aid entirely and force Pyongyang’s hand. The other would be to massively increase food aid so that the population actually receives sufficient calories to thrive.

Both strategies have obvious risks. Cut off aid and North Korea could strike out as a last ditch effort to force our hand in return. But Pyongyang might also be forced to spend more resources growing and buying food.

Double down on aid and North Korea might take advantage and happily divert yet more of its resources into the military. But it might also take the signal of peaceful intentions as an opportunity to go further in its ever-so-slight opening to the world.

[The Guardian]

Feeding North Koreans an ethical conundrum

Excerpts of Guardian opinion by Marcus Noland, director of studies at the Peterson Institute for International Economics:

The most recent UNICEF survey suggests that 10% of the country’s two-year-olds are afflicted with severe stunting. Stunting of that degree at that age is irrecoverable and confers a lifetime of physical and mental challenges.

When the country finally admitted in 1995 that it was facing famine, the international community responded with considerable generosity, at one point feeding roughly a third of the population. But the North Korean government has never accepted the international norms in the provision of aid, impeding normal assessment, monitoring, and evaluation functions of the relief organizations.

Critically, with assistance ramping up, the government cut commercial grain imports – in essence using humanitarian aid as a form of balance of payments support, freeing up resources to finance the importation of advanced military weaponry.

The resources needed to close the hunger gap could be closed for something in the order of $8-19m — less than 0.2% of national income or one per cent of the military budget.

We evidently care more about hungry North Koreans than their government does. We should provide assistance. But we should be clear-eyed about the terms of that engagement and seek to provide aid in ways consistent with our values and our obligations under international law.

Should the world continue to fund food aid to North Korea?

For nearly three decades, a chronic food emergency has gripped North Korea. In the 1990s a famine killed up to five per cent of the pre-crisis population.

Pyongyang presses on with its nuclear programme and prestige projects while millions remain malnourished. The long-running food crisis is the outcome of decades of economic mismanagement and a political system that absolves its leadership of any real accountability.

Humanitarian activities by the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) and private relief groups constitute the longest ongoing engagement between the hermit state and the international community. But the North Korean regime’s actions create an ethical conundrum which may be reaching its breaking point.

Donor fatigue has set in. The WFP’s assistance requests are grossly undersubscribed and the organization may be forced to shut down its remaining programme. And if it tries to soldier on with reduced resources, its ability to monitor its own activities will be badly affected, risking aid diversion and catastrophic scandal.

[The Guardian]