Faced with these shocks, the government did take a number of policy initiatives to increase domestic supplies. In December 1993, the government admitted that the Third Seven-Year Plan 1987–93 had not fulfilled its objectives. This admission was a surprising one for a government of this sort, although the failure was attributed to external shocks rather than any inherent problems in the socialist strategy. Some government actions marked departures from past policy and the first stirrings of the “reform from below” that occurred during the famine. The government increased the permissible scale of private gardens from 80 to 120 square meters, though the gardens remained merely privately tended, not privately owned, and were situated on marginal, nonirrigated land.
Similarly, after an attempt to crack down on black markets before 1993, the government also extended the frequency and scope of farmers’ markets. These markets were at least temporarily allowed to trade in grains, a major departure, as we will show in more detail below.
The dominant approach of the government, however, was to focus on tech- nical fixes that reflected a continuation of past policy rather than policy reforms emphasizing producer incentives. Among the government’s reforms were efforts to expand grain-sown areas, shift crop composition in favor of high-yield rice and corn, maximize industrial inputs (subject to availability), and intensify double-cropping and dense planting—in short, what it had done in the past.
Continuous cropping led to soil depletion, and the overuse of chemical fer-
tilizers contributed to acidification of the soil and eventually a reduction in yields.12 As yields declined, hillsides were denuded to bring more and more marginal land into production. These measures contributed to soil erosion and river silting and thus bear some responsibility for the catastrophic effects of the flooding that occurred in 1995.
The increasing vulnerability associated with the government’s strategy to increase grain output provides the context for considering the effects of the succession of natural disasters that struck the country from the middle of the decade (for a catalog of these, see Woo-Cumings 2002:27–29). Catastrophic floods hit the country in July and August 1995. In mid-August, the North Korean government announced that the floods had resulted in nearly two mil- lion tons of lost grain, the destruction of over 300,000 hectares of cropland, and the displacement of 5.4 million people.13 The flooding played an important role in the politics of the crisis, since it provided the opening for the govern- ment to portray the problem as a natural disaster, to admit to catastrophic crop failures, and to seek international relief more openly. For example, the government unit charged with obtaining international assistance was renamed the Flood Damage Rehabilitation Committee (FDRC), a guise that a number of foreign relief agencies found advantageous as well. The floods of 1995 were followed by less severe floods in July 1996 and by drought in 1997 and again in 2000–2001 when the most serious postfamine shortages emerged.
In considering the effects of these various shocks, it is useful to start with what we know about agricultural output. We know of serious food shortages in 1945–46, in 1954–55, and again in 1970–73 (see S. Lee 2003 for a discussion of each of these episodes). Thereafter, the industrial approach to agriculture bore some fruit before the country started to reach its limits in the late 1980s.
We present the data available in two ways. Figure 2.3 provides four official esti- mates of production that are commonly used in discussions of North Korean food output: North Korean official pronouncements and estimates from the Food and Agricultural Organization (which most closely mirror official pro- nouncements), the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), and the South Korean Ministry of Unification. Table 2.2 includes the same four sets of estimates shown in figure 2.3 but also all others by independent researchers of which we are aware.
As can be seen, these estimates differ on several crucial points. All four of the series tracked in figure 2.3 show increases in production through most of the 1980s. They also all show a decline in output during the first half of the 1990s.
But differences in the timing and depth of this decline are highly consequential for any interpretation of the famine. Those that appear to reflect more closely
The Origins of the Great Famine 35
FIGURE 2.3. Estimates of North Korean Grain Production, 1982–2005 Sources: FAOSTAT; USDAFAS; Korean Ministry of Unification: Woo 2004.
information provided by the government show a pattern of high initial output followed by a sharp collapse in 1995–96; Lee, Nakano, and Nabukuni (1995) also show an output collapse but from lower levels of production.
A number of factors, however, lead us to doubt the veracity of this “high initial output, rapid collapse” scenario or even the “steady output, sudden col- lapse” variant. First, there is evidence of several sorts (which we review in more detail in chapter 3) that the government was concerned about food availabil- ity well before the mid-1990s. This evidence includes stepped-up diplomatic efforts to secure external sources of supply, acknowledgment of difficulties and the tentative reforms noted above, hortatory campaigns to reduce consump- tion, and the first reports from defectors of food shortages in 1993. If domestic production really were as high as the official pronouncements or the FAO series show, there would have been no reason for food shortages in the absence of some fundamental change in entitlements. But there is no evidence of such a change.
TABLE 2.2. Domestic Production Estimates, 1990–96. (millions of metric tons in milled grain equivalent)
1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 High initial output, rapid collapse
Official announcements (UNDP 1998)
9.00 8.90 8.80 9.00 7.10 3.50 2.50
Roundtable 7.58 7.26 7.27 7.06 7.50 5.73 2.77
FAO 8.10 8.80 8.60 9.10 7.20 3.70 2.50
Steady output, sudden collapse
Lee, Nakano, and Nabukuni 1995 5.79 5.72 5.84 5.82 5.85 5.90 2.84
Secular decline
NUB 5.48 4.81 4.43 4.27 3.88 4.13 3.45
USDA/FAS 5.08 4.30 3.86 3.72 3.42 3.83 3.38
Kim 2003 4.43 3.90 2.92 3.77 2.60
WFP 4.08 2.84
Sources: Noland 2000, table 5.1; FAOSTAT n.d.
Second, there are strategic reasons for the government to present the esti- mates that they did. Caught up in a major foreign policy crisis in the first part of the decade, the political leadership did not want to reveal any signs of weakness or vulnerability to external pressure or sanctions. Once the govern- ment had admitted its difficulties, however, its incentives were almost exactly the opposite: the greater the production shortfall, the greater the humanitarian relief that would be warranted.
Third, there are some technical issues with the data that reflect the difficulty of dealing with a closed society. To this day, there is still some confusion about whether the North Korean numbers are reporting hulled grain. The high esti- mates for the earlier period might well be reporting harvests on an unhulled basis, thus overstating food availability. Conversely, for the political reasons noted above, the government may have switched to reporting hulled grain at some point to highlight the shortfall.
In our view, the “secular decline” story is much more plausible than those focusing simply on the short-run collapse of output. Agriculture, like the rest of the economy, saw a steady contraction over the first half of the decade, a result of declining inputs such as fertilizer (figure 2.2) and the limits of the
The Origins of the Great Famine 37
government’s industrial approach to food production. The estimates produced by the USDA and the South Korean Ministry of Unification indicate that grain production fell by more than 15 percent between 1990 and 1994, well before the floods. In our construction of a food balance sheet for the country, however, we entertain the possibility that these estimates might nonetheless still be high for 1996–97; as can be seen, it is in those two postflood years when there is the greatest divergence in the series since the mid-1990s. We therefore take that possibility into account.
Nonetheless, the review up to this point establishes two important points.
First, as the situation deteriorated in the early 1990s, the government was fatally slow in adjusting to its changed economic circumstances. The deterioration in the country’s external credit and balance of payments—not to mention its nuclear brinksmanship—made it difficult to pursue commercial sources of imports. But the government was also slow and secretive in exploring con- cessional sources of food as well. After a failed overture to the World Food Programme and South Korea in the early 1990s, it was not until the fall of 1994 that North Korea again opened an aid offensive by approaching the Japa- nese for assistance. In the absence of any sense of urgency emanating from the North Koreans themselves, it was unlikely that potential donors would respond aggressively. It was not until 1995 that the government openly appealed for outside support and even then the full magnitude of the crisis took some time to sink in. Not until 1996 did humanitarian assistance begin to flow into the country in any volume.
Second, this chronology, as well as information that we have on the timing of the onset of the famine (chapter 3), undermines the claim that the floods were the principal or even proximate determinant of food shortages (e.g., Woo- Cumings 2002, Smith 2005b). The flooding contributed to the food crisis both directly through the loss of stocks and the removal of farmland from production and indirectly through its impact on infrastructure and particularly the energy sector (Williams, von Hippel, and Hayes 2000). All the estimates reported in table 2.2 show a falloff of production in 1996, the year following the floods.
The agricultural sector, however, like the rest of the economy, had been in secular decline since the beginning of the decade, and the effects of the floods must be placed in the context of the other external shocks we have noted. On the basis of their econometric analysis of North Korean agricultural produc- tion, Heather Smith and Yiping Huang conclude that “the dominant triggering factor in the crisis was the sharp loss of supplies of agricultural inputs following the disruption of the trade with the socialist bloc from the late 1980s. The contribution of climatic factors to the agricultural crisis, as stressed by North
Korea’s policy-makers, was at most a secondary cause” (2003:756). This conclu- sion is supported by the computable general equilibrium model-based simula- tion of Marcus Noland, Sherman Robinson, and Tao Wang (2001), who find that restoration of flood-affected land and capital would have had but a minor impact on the availability of food.