Under the PDS, each of the twelve provinces and special province-level munici- palities (Pyongyang, Namp’o, and Kaeso˘ng) has a Food Administration Depart- ment (FAO/WFP 1998b). Each of the more than two hundred counties and urban districts (seventeen cities and thirty-six urban districts) of the country also has a Food Administration Section and a warehouse. The county ware- house is the primary source of food supplies to the lower-level public distribu- tion centers (PDCs) throughout the county as well as the distribution channel for food commodities specifically allocated to institutions such as nurseries, kindergartens, and hospitals. Outside of food going to these institutions, the PDCs are the final “retail” outlet for all cereal food distribution to the general public other than cooperative farmers. Each PDC covers a specific geographical area with population ranging from 1,500 to 3,000 families.
Although the North Korean political and administrative system appears cen- tralized and hierarchical, it is in fact decentralized in several important respects and became more so as the food crisis deepened. One implication of the central government’s push for self-sufficiency at the county and provincial levels was
The Distribution of Misery 53
that local authorities had to coordinate not only the supply of food but its demand as well. As a result, local officials exercised considerable influence over the distribution of food in their jurisdiction.
The county level of government is an intermediary link between the pro- vincial level authorities and those at the village level. As we have discussed, the agricultural strategy of the government encouraged self-sufficiency at fairly low levels of administrative organization. County-level warehouses are controlled by the county-level People’s Committees, which are made up of party function- aries and senior administrative cadre. These committees played an important role both in the collection of food—by transmitting targets and supervising grain collection from the cooperatives in their jurisdictions—and in allocating food to the ultimate “retail” sites. County-level party and administrative offi- cials were also at the front line in coping with the shortfalls that spread across the country as the famine deepened.
At the onset of the famine, the PDS distributed food to between 60 and 70 percent of the population at highly subsidized prices (FAO/WFP 1996).1 The allocation of rations followed a complex system of occupational and age-related stratification; table 3.1 shows these allocations at the beginning of the 1990s as well as estimates of the population falling in each group. This hierarchy of entitlements broke down in the 1990s and therefore should not be treated as a guide to how different occupational groups fared; according to the first direc- tor of the WFP operations in Pyongyang, the famine reduced the number of distinct PDS categories to three (Becker 1996). Nonetheless, several general points about this system are worth noting.
First, for those in urban areas, the availability of food outside the PDS was extremely limited before the marketization of the 1990s and, more important, prohibitively costly. In 1992 a kilo of rice through the PDS cost .08 won; on the market, it sold for 25 won a kilo, over three hundred times the PDS price and approximately 35 percent of the average monthly wage (S. Lee 2003:table 8–11). Control over access to food thus constituted one of the central elements of overall political and social control.
Second, the distribution of food reflected quite openly the basic principles of stratification in the socialist system. At the top of the hierarchy of entitlements were the military and special security forces and high-ranking government offi- cials, as well as those engaged in heavy labor. Yet table 3.1 does not fully capture the system of privilege because the top ranks of the political class were also cen- trally rather than generally supplied, receiving their rations through the party or special suppliers within the government (S. Lee 2003:255); this fact is impor- tant when we take up the issue of diversion of food to the military and political
TABLE 3.1. PDS Allocations and Population Estimates by Occupation Population distributionRatio of Rice to Corn
Occupation and
Source: Adapted from Kim, Lee and Sumner 1998. Note: Figures in brackets appear as such in original source to indicate that they were calculated under assumptions of the population distribution. Popula- tion figures for preschool students correspond to “Children under 6 years” in original source.
elite in chapter 4.2 The military—which includes not only combat units but also an array of productive enterprises—maintained its own internal distribu- tion system. The Provisions Bureau, under the General Rear Services Bureau of the Ministry of the People’s Armed Forces, had responsibility both for sup- plying rations to military units and for managing the military’s emergency war stockpiles of food and fuel. At the bottom of the hierarchy were children—who have lower caloric needs—but also the elderly and disabled. These vulnerable groups naturally became a central focus of the relief efforts.
Not noted in the table are the inmates of the country’s vast political prison system, which probably held roughly two hundred thousand prisoners, or just under 1 percent of the population. By numerous refugee accounts, the rations
The Distribution of Misery 55
allocated to prisoners were well below subsistence levels, suggesting a policy of deliberate starvation, and mortality levels were extremely high (see, e.g., Kang 2002; Hawk 2003:25).
These apparent principles of distribution do not fully capture the underlying system of entitlements, however, because assignment to these occupational cat- egories in turn rested to some extent on political status.3 Since the purges of the late 1950s, the Korean Workers’ Party has undertaken a succession of efforts to investigate the class background of the population and to classify individuals in terms of their political reliability.4 These efforts drew a basic distinction among
“core,” wavering,” and “hostile” classes based on family background. The most recent effort at categorization rested on a highly differentiated set of fifty-one social groups. For example, families of workers, soldiers, or party members were consid- ered core; families of middle peasants, traders, and owners of small businesses were considered wavering. The government classified twenty-nine distinct groups as hostile, from families of rich peasants, to individuals with clear religious identities, to the intelligentsia and even returning Chinese and Japanese Koreans.
Membership in these categories did not directly determine access to food, but it had powerful indirect effects. Class position influenced membership and promotion in the party, access to education and housing, and work assignments and subsequent mobility. Class position also had important implications for resi- dence. Beginning in the late 1950s, members of the hostile class were relocated to remote parts of the country that experienced severe deprivation during the famine. Interestingly, many of the counties suspected of housing such internal exiles as well as the large-scale penal colonies for political prisoners have remained off-limits to external monitoring.5 By contrast, members of the core class were much more likely to gain residence in Pyongyang. By all accounts, residency in Pyongyang—which constitutes roughly 15 percent of the population—is a privi- lege. Its residents fare much better than those living elsewhere in the country and were protected to at least some extent from the worst of the famine.
Finally, it is important to consider the question of the size and composi- tion of the elite in North Korea: those whom the government would seek to protect. A recent South Korean estimate from the mid-1990s suggested that the core class constituted 28 percent of the population,6 and the Korean Workers’
Party is relatively large by Communist standards; Armstrong (2001) estimates membership as high as 15 percent of the population.
These relatively broad definitions of favored groups are much too inclusive, however. The core class includes families with working-class and peasant back- grounds who were by no means elite. The party includes low-level cadre at the village and work-unit level who were almost certainly not protected during the
famine. The military, security, and high-ranking government and party officials constitute only 6 percent of all those receiving rations in this form. Nonethe- less, there is ample evidence, including from a speech attributed to Kim Jo˘ng- il himself, that the military was not fully protected from food shortages and hunger (1996). The very first reports to leak out of the country in 1993 came from military defectors who noted problems of malnutrition within the army (Associated Press 1993; Becker 1996). Nor was residency in Pyongyang a guar- antee. Accounts by expatriates living in Pyongyang report signs of food short- ages during the famine (e.g., Harrold 2004)—although not of starvation—and from at least 1998 if not before, the North Korean government has made efforts to reduce the size of Pyongyang and other provincial cities by relocating people to rural areas (KINU 2004:31–32).
It is impossible to say what the size of the protected population was; for the purpose of estimating the death toll, we estimate that four million people were probably protected from extreme deprivation through one means or another (resi- dence in Pyongyang, party connections, being in the military). But it is too facile to say that the North Korean government simply protected the elite while allowing others to starve, unless by “elite” we mean a narrow circle of the very top party, government, and military leadership.7 Many if not most of this group of four mil- lion almost certainly experienced food shortages and even hunger at some time during the famine. The food crisis of the 1990s thus cut at the very base of the regime’s support and posed serious problems of political legitimacy and control.