NYT: WFP Operations in North Korea End; A Good Time to Reassess the Sunshine Policy

James Brooke reports:

The United Nations World Food Program, which was helping to feed a third of the 22 million people of North Korea as recently as August, has ended all feeding programs there at the request of the government. “Operations are completely halted,” Richard Ragan, an American who represents the agency in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, said Friday in a telephone interview.

Noting that government pressure had already forced a cutback this fall, he said: “We were feeding 600,000 people in December. As of Jan. 1 we are feeding nobody.” The agency has closed its five offices outside Pyongyang, closed its 19 food processing plants in the country and cut its foreign staff there nearly in half, to about 25, Mr. Ragan said from Beijing.

In the last decade the agency has spent an estimated $1.7 billion to feed North Koreans. A major source of food for the nation’s poor, the agency is believed to have helped cut malnutrition rates.

What is apt to be forgotten in this discussion is that even with its monitoring regime, the WFP still wasn’t able to enter vast closed areas of North Korea, and that in a repressed society like North Korea, interviewees were observed by minders and unlikely to respond honestly to questions about what they’d received (the WFP and the regime both preferred to call these minders “translators;” no Korean-speaking aid workers were allowed in). In other words, WFP monitoring itself was insufficient.

I also doubt the USDA projections that the N. Korean harvest is up. As I recently explained in an e-mail to GI Korea, those projections are largely based on satellite imagery, which would likely have projected that the squirrel food I ended up with in my backyard would have been a bumper crop. Again, I cite Andrew Natsios. Those projections are not worth much. What I don’t know is the extent to which North Korea’s own stats form a basis for the projections; enough said there. You need on-the-ground reports, and those reports are much less optimistic. On the other hand, I acknowledge that most experts–including experts I respect–accept the projections of an increase, although one of those experts, Marcus Noland, mostly attributes it to the regime’s more determined confiscation of crops from farmers, as opposed to higher food production. None of the experts, however, believes that the increase will approach sufficiency to feed North Korea’s underclass. Millions of North Koreans are certain to go hungry this winter. All of which reveals the ruthless cynicism of this:

In a symbolic gesture, the North shipped one ton of rice to South Korea last week, the first such food shipment since 1984.

There’s little disagreement on why the North Koreans are doing this, however.

[M]any foreign analysts say the secretive nation’s rulers are pursuing a strategy to cut the number of Westerners roaming the countryside inspecting food distribution networks. While World Food Program aid was being phased out, food aid from China and South Korea rose. Last year China and the South each sent about 500,000 tons of grain.

“One of their key concerns was about how we monitored our program,” Mr. Ragan said, noting that food program workers made 300 to 500 inspection visits each month. “The Chinese don’t monitor at all, as far as I am aware,” he said, while South Korea has announced that it plans to make 20 inspection visits this year.

Clearly, 20 inspection visits a year by representatives of a South Korean government that wouldn’t criticize this North Korean regime for any reason is nothing but a preposterous display. It is token monitoring that permits South Korea to respond to criticism that it’s feeding the very army that U.S. taxpayers are spending $12 billion a year to keep at bay. If you still believe that the U.S.-Korean alliance in its present form still serves the interests and values of the United States, explain that one to me. Another of the regime’s political decisions behind this move:

In addition to evicting the World Food Program’s staff, the North has ordered the 12 European aid groups working in the country to leave by spring. Three left in recent days because of an expulsion order that was imposed last fall after the European Union proposed a United Nations resolution criticizing the North’s human rights record.

The regime’s strategy is apparently to hold its own people hostage to deter criticism of the very policies–such as squandering $5 billion a year on defense while its people starve–that create the need for food aid in the first place.

One other point this article raises brings us to as good a time as any to reassess South Korea’s Appeasement Sunshine Policy, which has now been in effect for nearly nine years, and which is based on the idea that paying protection money and bribes, and abandoning the regime’s victims to their fate constructive engagement would bring gradual changes in the North Korean regime:

In October, the North rescinded a free-market development when it banned the private sale of grain. By restoring the state-run rationing system, the government apparently hopes to win more control over the urban population, which was restive over high food prices in private markets. But the end of private markets is expected to alienate farmers and cut food production next summer.

Not to mention the human rights situation, which hasn’t improved one iota. All of which leaves me will the sick feeling I spent four years serving in the USFK effectively helping to keep Kim Jong-Il’s regime in power; after all, how could Kim Dae Jung have afforded all that bribe and protection money without our presence? Can anyone out there name one way in which nearly nine years of the Sunshine Policy have provided a single significant benefit to the ordinary people of North Korea? And how does such an alliance still serve the interests of the United States? I see the South Korean Embassy in my visitors’ log at least weekly. Maybe someone there can answer my question. Consider yourselves challenged to respond. You may explain your answer at as much length as you wish.