From the outset, the multilateral agencies and NGOs in North Korea operated at a disadvantage because they did not have a presence in the country when the crisis broke and thus lacked accumulated, on-the-ground expertise. The United Nations Development Program had established an office in 1980 and helped to organize early humanitarian assistance (Smith 2002). But it took time for other organizations to establish even a rudimentary presence, and the North Korean government was far from cooperative. The WFP established an office in Pyongyang in November 1995, but early monitoring was limited to the west coast.7 The NGOs faced the particular problem that the North Korean authori- ties were resistant even to granting residential status at all, forcing coordination both among the NGOs that did enjoy residential status and between those that were in-country and those who were not.8
The multilateral response was also affected by very different assessments of the nature and extent of the food problem among some of the principal actors,
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assessments that remain controversial and even divisive to this day. Informa- tion filtering out along the Chinese border provided evidence of severe food shortages and even famine conditions quite early, and a number of journalists, NGOs, and analysts jumped on these reports and reached conclusions that, with the benefit of hindsight, were largely justified (Becker 1996, 1998b; Snyder 1996; Lautze 1997; KBSM 1998). Certain analysts in the U.S., Japanese, and South Korean intelligence and foreign policy communities almost certainly had similar information, although they were in some cases constrained from speak- ing out (Natsios 1999:170–71).
But for some of those sitting in Pyongyang—or suspicious of North Korean motives, or reluctant to provide assistance—the evidence of famine was much less straightforward or altogether lacking.9 Highly orchestrated visits to insti- tutions housing the malnourished could be read as evidence of a much wider problem but could also be interpreted as a cynical play for sympathy—and more aid. With initial access limited entirely to the west coast and to tightly controlled visits, outsiders also lacked access to the types of information—the markers—that would allow them to gauge the extent and severity of the prob- lem: information on food prices, which tend to rise sharply during famines;
evidence of large-scale population movements and foraging; evidence on diet, such as the consumption of inferior foods; surveys on actual nutrition and health status or mortality. Not until the WFP pressed successfully for the open- ing of the northeastern provinces in May 1997 did the extent of the damage already incurred become fully apparent and was it possible to ramp up supplies to these highly distressed areas.
Whatever the differences among the early assessments, the first WFP/FAO teams were quite blunt in underscoring that the food crisis was not simply a result of the floods. Rather, structural and policy problems in the agricultural sector and in the economy more generally were to blame.10
From the outset, however, the North Korean government defined the issue as a humanitarian concern that centered on providing food aid to flood victims.
The main interlocutor for both the WFP and NGOs was the FDRC, a commit- tee of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The main objective of this committee was to maximize the flow of food aid to the country while stringently controlling the access of the multilateral agencies and NGOs. As one close observer put it, “The interaction between the FDRC and the international humanitarian aid commu- nity was adversarial from its inception, since the primary task of the FDRC was to watch the international food monitors and only secondarily to help ensure that assistance was delivered to end users” (Snyder 2003a:6). Indicative of this stance is the fact that through 2005 UN special rapporteur on the right to food Jean
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Ziegler was denied entry to the DPRK five times, despite the fact that UN pro- grams had been feeding nearly one-third of the population on an ongoing basis.
Despite the North Korean government’s unwillingness to abandon its expla- nation that the floods were the driving cause of the food shortage, it quickly became apparent that the scope of the humanitarian disaster was much, much wider. In principle, the appropriate response to a geographically limited disaster would be to provide the victims with emergency financial support, enabling them to prioritize their needs and allocate resources accordingly. This approach was not possible in the North Korean case and frequently is not politically fea- sible from the perspective of donors. The donors surely did not trust the North Korean authorities to administer financial transfers. In any event, North Korea was not a market economy, and this first-best approach could not work. Instead, aid was provided in-kind and sourced outside the country. This approach was consistent with the politics of the main donor, the United States, where the farm lobby supports US-sourced food as the primary modality of relief. But it also accorded with the political interests of the North Korean government, which insisted that the PDS serve as the conduit of this externally sourced aid.
Given donor concerns about North Korean reticence with respect to access, the WFP had to define the target groups it sought to reach and construct an elaborate mechanism to ensure that externally sourced aid was actually reach- ing the intended beneficiaries. Each WFP appeal was thus accompanied by a relatively detailed outline of target groups (appendix 2, table 4).
This targeting went through several phases. In the first appeal cycle in 1995, food was targeted at flood victims. In subsequent appeals, the pretense that humanitarian relief was going to immediate victims of the floods or other natu- ral disasters was dropped. As the numbers fed through the WFP rose dramati- cally, from 500,000 in 1995 to nearly 7.5 million in 1998, the WFP identified two basic target groups (figure 4.2; appendix 2, table 4). The first was a set of groups that were vulnerable because of their particular food needs, age, or position within the household, such as children, pregnant and nursing women, and the elderly. These groups dominated the highly elaborated—and spuriously precise—language of the appeals (“297,955 pregnant/nursing women” [FAO/
WFP 2003]). After 1998 these groups were also the target of WFP-sponsored factories that began to produce fortified biscuits and noodles. A second target group comprised the beneficiaries of a food-for-work program. This program combined distribution of food to rural reconstruction projects that fed as many as 1 million people (including direct participants and dependents) each year.
The total targeted populations peaked at more than 8 million in 1999 and 2000, amounting to well over one-third of the population, and remained in excess of 6 million through 2005. This policy of casting relief in terms of narrowly
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FIGURE 4.2. WFP Targets by Appeal
Sources: FAO/WFP 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998a, 1998b, 1999a, 1999b, 2003, 2004; UN-OCHA n.d.b.
targeted groups was almost certainly suboptimal in principle but arose out of the specific political constraints embodied in the North Korean case.
In the period since the 2002 reforms, the WFP began to collect survey and focus group information suggesting the particular vulnerability of PDS-depen- dent urban households and to develop a quite nuanced understanding of the identity of the most seriously affected groups (FAO/WFP 2003, 2004). The target groups did not change in composition, but WFP statements suggest an effort to shift resources toward urban households in the northeast in particular and to extend the food-for-work effort into the cities.
A crucial feature of the North Korean setting was that the multilateral agen- cies had no independent channels for delivering food to these targeted groups and were not allowed to develop them. A number of vulnerable groups, how- ever, were either institutionalized or had daily contact with institutions, namely, hospitals, orphanages, kindergartens, and schools.11 By targeting these groups, the WFP could sidestep the charge that it was supporting a public distribution system used to control the population and channel food to privileged groups.
Whatever the political merits of focusing on such vulnerable groups, the sub- stantive merits are somewhat less clear. First, it is not obvious that this particular definition of the vulnerable was appropriate given the setting. These groups were certainly among the hardest hit in any community that faced serious shortages, and feeding children frees up food that can be consumed by other household members.
But distress had a strong regional dimension, and some members of the groups
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targeted were in fact protected. Attempting to feed all the children in the country almost certainly channeled food to less deserving households. This targeting strat- egy would also have done little for an urban family with no school-age children.
Although these criticisms have some merit, it is probably misguided to over- target in a setting in which distress is broad. The larger problem was institu- tional. The North Korean food system does not have a distinct channel for distribution to schools, hospitals, and orphanages or to pregnant and nursing mothers. Even if it did, the WFP would not have controlled it. Food going to these institutions and individuals passed through the county-level warehouses and thus the county-level People’s Committees, as did processed food coming from the factories that the WFP set up after 1998.12
These crucial decision makers do not have an interest in seeing the people in their jurisdictions starve. They are closer to their constituents than the govern- ment in Pyongyang. Many aid workers have remarked on the fact that local officials were generally more engaging and responsive than their political supe- riors. County-level officials may also be influenced at the margin by checks on their behavior through monitoring, an issue we take up in more detail below.
But these party and administrative leaders had to deal with a number of competing demands on any food they received: from local military and impor- tant work units, to the “retail” distribution centers (PDCs), to the lures of corruption and diversion to the market. Whatever the target groups designated by the WFP were, multilateral food assistance passed through the same basic distribution channels that supported the PDS and was ultimately commingled with other sources of supply. Food-for-work beneficiaries were essentially sup- plied through the same distribution channels. On this point, the critics are undoubtedly right: food aid passed through and supported the PDS.
An important question, therefore, is whether dependence on state distri- bution channels, and effectively the PDS, affected the extent to which food reached intended beneficiaries. We argue that this debate is to some extent misguided. The problem was not the reliance on state distribution channels per se but the cooperativeness of the government in using them. Such cooperation was limited, to say the least.