Diversion
Allegations of diversion and the corruption of the aid effort have dogged relief efforts in North Korea from their start in 1995. There are three reasons to be concerned with the diversion of food aid. The first is the obvious, humanitarian one: aid is intended to relieve the suffering of the most vulnerable, and having it reach its intended beneficiaries is a better outcome than having it consumed by those who are less vulnerable or altogether undeserving. A second reason for concern has to do not with the deserving but with the undeserving. Most forms of diversion involve corruption: not only do targeted beneficiaries go without allotted food while the less deserving are fed, but corrupt officials and others enrich themselves in the process.
But beyond these direct welfare considerations lies a third concern: that diversion could destroy political support for relief programs in donor coun- tries. In February 2001, the UN special rapporteur for food rights, Jean Ziegler, wrote, Most of the international food aid was being diverted by the army, the secret services, and the Government” (United Nations Commission on Human Rights 2001:11). In asking that this assessment be retracted, the executive direc- tor of the WFP, Catherine Bertini, admitted that her “gravest concern is that this erroneous information will undermine the political will of our donors”
(NAPSnet Daily Report 2001).
The question of diversion is both contentious and poorly understood, and we therefore begin with the microeconomics of the process. Diversion is a distributional issue. Diverted aid does not vanish into the ether; someone con-
Diversion 109 sumes it. The incidence of the gains and losses across different social groups therefore requires careful analysis. In the case of North Korea, where markets had historically been suppressed, we argue that aid diversion contributed to the their development. This change in the institutional environment in turn altered the distribution of gains and losses from diversion and the nature of food vulnerability more generally as an increasing share of total demand was met through the market.
In such a system, the incentives to divert aid from its intended recipients are clear and strong. Moreover, the weakness of the monitoring regime undoubt- edly provided ample opportunity to do so. Assessing the actual magnitude of any illicit activity is difficult, however. In making our evaluation, we appeal to a variety of sources of evidence: eyewitness and participant accounts, interviews with humanitarian aid workers, refugee surveys, and documentary evidence such as photographs and video footage. Finally, we present a balance sheet exer- cise that demonstrates that the estimates derived from these various sources are consistent—in a quantitative, accounting sense—with information about other aspects of the North Korean food economy in which we have at least somewhat greater confidence. Taken together, this evidence suggests that the magnitude of diversion is probably large, perhaps 30 percent or more of total aid.
Before considering evidence on the magnitude of diversion, it is important to distinguish between the common image of large-scale centralized diversion by state officials and the military, as implied by Ziegler, and what we call decen- tralized diversion by lower level officials. It is also important to note that, in the context of the state-controlled Public Distribution System, food can be diverted not only from aid sources but also from domestic production and the PDS. Moreover, aid can be diverted directly to consumption by the undeserv- ing but also into the market. The end recipients of diverted food purchased in the market might include the military and political elite and nontargeted groups. But purchasers of diverted aid also include targeted groups, who pay for the food instead of receiving it gratis.
We begin with the standard image of diversion as a centralized, large-scale process directed by the party and military for its own benefit. Certainly, the North Korean military has the ability to divert aid in this fashion if it wishes to, in part because of its political power, in part because of its logistic capabili- ties, in part because of the general weakness of the monitoring system and the specific exclusion of militarily sensitive areas. Anecdotal evidence has certainly confirmed that at least some donated food finds its way to the military and party cadre; often-repeated stories of this sort include the discovery of cans of food from a private NGO on a North Korean submarine that ran aground in
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1997 and eyewitness accounts by a U.S. House of Representatives staff delega- tion that visited the country in 1998 (U.S. House of Representatives 1999:23).
There are several reasons, however, to doubt centrally directed, large-scale diversion of humanitarian assistance to the military for its own consumption.
As the WFP’s John Powell testified with admirable frankness before the U.S.
Congress, “The army takes what it wants from the national harvest upfront, in full. And it takes it in the form that Koreans prefer: Korean rice” (Powell 2002:52). The form that most WFP aid takes—wheat, corn, protein biscuits—
is less appealing to an elite that has access to more desirable foods. In addition, there are other international sources of aid besides those channeled through the WFP that are not subject to monitoring at all. One WFP official, speaking from firsthand experience but on the condition of anonymity, described a bar- gain under which the DPRK military has access to aid donated by China, thus preserving the WFP’s claim that its food does not go directly to the military.
There is, however, a second and more plausible process that we call “decen- tralized diversion”: a variety of actions taken by lower-level party, administra- tive, and military personnel that divert food from intended beneficiaries to other consumers. The military no doubt undertook some of these actions dur- ing the famine and acute shortages, but not at the direction of central com- mand. Indeed, almost exactly the opposite was the case: incentives for diversion at the unit level arose because of the inability of the central military command structure to orchestrate supplies. Defectors have reported at various times that lower-ranking military personnel and those stationed in certain regions were not protected from food shortages. As early as 1993, a military defector report- ing malnutrition—and discontent—in the army stated that “soldiers are some- times selected to raid government food supplies meant for the people” (Asso- ciated Press 1993; Becker 1996). Refugee interviews conducted in 1997 just as the famine was cresting go further, suggesting a partial breakdown in military authority, with units in some areas of the country even having been broken up and soldiers told return to their villages (Becker 1997c).
These reports are by no means inconsistent with refugee interviews claim- ing that the military and party were shown preference in the distribution of food (Becker 1997b; 1998a).1 These interviews, reflecting on the high famine period, suggest that diversion from the PDS was occurring even before human- itarian aid arrived. Other reports suggest that soldiers in the northern part of the country were not simply diverting food from official channels but extort- ing food and money from households with Chinese relatives. One defector’s account is worth citing in full: “Soldiers received daily rations, but those were not enough to live on. So the chief of my son’s unit ordered them to forage
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in the countryside. Small companies were sent out to steal village stocks and if they found nothing in the granaries, they robbed people’s homes. One day my son protested and said he was not in the army to steal from people. He was immediately shot” (Becker 1997a). As succinct as this testimony is, it con- tains a wealth of information as well as drama: the breakdown of the military’s capacity to feed its troops; the organized pursuit of coping strategies through foraging; the ultimate and no doubt desperate turn to violence; the fate of those who protested.
A related source of decentralized diversion to military consumption arose from what Natsios calls the “militarization of agriculture” (1999:117). Partly to increase able-bodied labor, partly to prevent hoarding, the military established a greater presence on the state farms and collectives from 1996 on. So-called corn guards were deployed to stop preharvesting and diversion by farmers and had orders to kill “thieves.” The corn guards were themselves ill fed, however, and farmers were able to bribe them with food.
The political and ethical implications of decentralized diversion to consump- tion by the military or other less-deserving groups are more ambiguous than is commonly recognized. Certainly, the extortion of food at the barrel of a gun is hard to condone. But the North Korean army is made up of forced conscripts who serve for long periods in Spartan conditions. Decentralized diversion occurred not only to the military elite, and not because of the overwhelming power of the state, but to low-level conscripts and because of the inability of the military machine to feed itself. Indeed, as we have seen from Kim Jo˘ng-il’s speech, cited in chapter 3, a plausible explanation for the government’s reluc- tance to reveal the extent of its food problems was to conceal the deterioration of the military’s most basic capabilities.
To this point, we have focused largely on the politically contentious issue of diversion to the military. Yet this overlooks other channels through which food might be diverted and other sets of beneficiaries, including diversion to other undeserving groups and to the market. As we have seen, outside donors pri- oritized vulnerable segments of the population: children, pregnant and nursing mothers, the destitute, the infirm, and the elderly. The repeated experience of the aid community is that the North Korean regime did not fully share these priori- ties and was also seeking to protect key constituencies: not simply the military and senior party officials but also the capital city of Pyongyang and productive workers in key sectors. This struggle for political survival was being replayed at the local level, where county-level committees similarly had to choose between allocating food to vulnerable groups with little political influence and productive workers and farmers. A report from a South Korean NGO that we outline in
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more detail below claims to find evidence of exactly such priorities: government instructions that aid be channeled not just to the military but to workers in state-owned enterprises and administrative functions. Conversely, a recent report from an NGO worker with substantial experience in-country found an increase in overall access by 2005 and a willingness to let her drive across the countryside but continued resistance to meeting with the disabled who constituted one of the organization’s target groups (Caritas—Hong Kong 2005b).