In this chapter, we have outlined the principles governing the monitoring of food aid and the evolution of those principles in practice. We argued that these principles were in effect the subject of an ongoing negotiation between the donor community and the government, with some signs of progress—albeit from a low base—after 2000. But these gains were by no means irreversible, and 2004 witnessed a backlash against foreign monitoring that ended with the WFP narrowly managing to maintain its operations in the country.19
This backlash began in the summer, when the North Korean authorities
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indicated that they would not participate in the UN’s annual consolidated appeal, were requesting the dissolution of the UN’s Office for the Coordi- nation of Humanitarian Affairs in Pyongyang after August 2005, and were threatening to expel NGOs that did not bring in sufficient volumes of aid.
In September 2004, the government began to take a number of restrictive measures: limiting the overall number of visits (from over five hundred a month to around three hundred a month; see figure 4.6), closing a number of counties and the whole province of Chagang (although some counties were subsequently reopened); and limiting household survey questions not directly related to food.
Observers ascribed a variety of motivations to these developments. One line of reasoning was that with the worst of the food emergency easing and with South Korean aid beginning to flow in large quantities, the DPRK did not need other, more intrusive assistance as badly and was less willing to make political concessions to secure it. The DPRK was receiving enough food aid, if all sources were considered, and would prefer development assistance because it was more fungible. Moreover, North Korean authorities were tired of WFP requests to visit PDCs, follow trucks carrying supplies, and do more interviews with recipients and focus groups. In short, in the words of one WFP offi- cial, the North Koreans were getting fed up with having forty WFP monitors
“traipsing around their country.”
Yet another possible explanation is that the government’s fears were in fact warranted. The period after 2000 had seen an increasing penetration of infor- mation originating from outside the country through increased access to mobile phones, videotapes, and other sources of information such as travel to China (Lankov 2006a). The North’s harder line might therefore have been a reflection of a government increasingly concerned about losing internal political control and the impact of a visible foreign presence on this process. And, of course, there is yet another, and perhaps simpler, explanation: monitoring did in fact constitute a partial check on behavior, and, as we will discuss below, members of the North Korean government who were involved in diversion might have simply preferred a less rigorous monitoring regime.
These conflicts gave rise to intense negotiations between the North Korean authorities and the WFP over monitoring questions. In a press conference in March 2005 that received wide distribution, WFP regional director Anthony Banbury suggested that the government and the WFP had reached an agree- ment “in principle” to a shift in the monitoring regime.20 In return for a reduc- tion in the overall number of visits, the WFP proposed four changes to the monitoring system:
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• Household food information. Every four months the WFP would under- take baseline household surveys, interview local officials and others (e.g., farmers, factory officials), hold focus group discussions, and take observa- tional walks. The first household survey was conducted in June 2005.
• Distribution monitoring. The WFP would shift at the margin to moni- toring distribution centers and food-for-work projects, interview those receiving food aid there, and increase monitoring visits to nonhousehold sites (e.g., county warehouses, factories producing food products with WFP commodities, institutions receiving food aid).
• Ration cards. All WFP beneficiaries would be given a WFP-designed and -printed ration card that would be checked by the WFP at distributions.
As of August 2005, the distribution of these cards was nearly complete.
• Commodity tracking. WFP staff would be allowed to follow food aid physically from the port of entry, to county warehouses, to three to six public distribution centers per county, as well as implementing a more uniform and consistent system to track commodities by waybill number, with the ultimate goal of eventually introducing an electronic system that would allow tracking of individual bags from port to final point of deliv- ery. The first visits to PDCs began in June 2005.
These developments were promising; fully implemented and sustained, the changes would have marked an important advance in monitoring. Subsequent events, however, revealed that the North Koreans had no intention of sub- jecting themselves to greater scrutiny; to the contrary, increased aid and an improved harvest provided them with the leverage to squeeze the WFP.
In the fall of 2005, North Korea experienced its best harvest in a decade, and South Korea increased its aid. The North Koreans responded to these eased supply conditions by demanding that the WFP switch from food aid to devel- opment assistance and that all foreign personnel from private aid groups leave the country by year’s end. They also banned private trade in grain, announced a revival of the PDS, and confiscated grain from North Korean farmers, pol- icy developments we take up in greater detail in the conclusion to chapter 7.
According to the WFP’s resident representative in Pyongyang, Richard Ragan, the monitoring regime constituted a major motive for these actions. Accord- ing to Ragan, the North Koreans “repeatedly stressed that our monitoring is too excessive” (Agence France Press 2005). (This claim was paradoxical insofar as development assistance would require even greater contact with foreigners and transparency in financial operations.)21 A North Korean diplomat similarly cited the passage of the North Korean Human Rights Act in the United States,
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which linked continuing support for humanitarian activities to improvements in transparency (Brooke 2005).
The United Nations’ immediate response was to underline the continued precariousness of the situation in North Korea and the indispensability of its presence. Whatever the humanitarian merits of this position, it effectively sig- naled that the WFP was unwilling to walk away and consequently reduced negotiating leverage with the North Koreans over the terms of engagement.22 What followed was a diplomatic dance that ultimately resulted in the suspen- sion of WFP operations in North Korea at the end of 2005, followed by the approval in February 2006 by the WFP executive board of a proposal for a greatly scaled-down program. The proposed program would feed roughly 1.9 million beneficiaries, less than one-third of the previously targeted population, requiring 150,000 metric tons of commodities at a cost of approximately $102 million (WFP 2006a). Confirming our emphasis on the government’s concerns about monitoring, the North Koreans demanded a reduction in staff to ten or fewer, closure of the regional offices outside Pyongyang, and confinement of this staff to Pyongyang with only quarterly opportunities to visit project sites in the field, a stunning concession that the WFP incorporated into its proposal.
As of this writing, critical aspects of the terms of engagement remained to be negotiated with the North Korean government, and the United States remained noncommittal pending the outcome of these negotiations. But the negotiations underscore the basic points we have made here about the strategic nature of negotiations over transparency and monitoring issues with North Korea. When times are good, the government moves to limit access; when times are tough, they make the concessions necessary to secure at least adequate assistance.
The importance of transparency and monitoring for donors is not simply a humanitarian issue; it relates to the politically sensitive question of whether assistance is being diverted into unauthorized uses. It is to this contentious issue of diversion that we now turn.