Götterdämmerung Watch
The Wall Street Journal has two must-read op-eds on the decline of North Korea’s capacity to control the flow of food, money, and information within its territory. Marcus Noland, sounding very much like Kushibo, sees a “tipping point” after The Great Confiscation:
Once broken, the economy may prove difficult to repair. Prices for goods such as rice, corn and the dollar rose 6,000% or more after the reform. And while prices have come down from their peak as the government has relaxed some of its strictures, they are currently still 600% or more above their prereform levels–in spite of the money-supply contraction.
Noland also reveals this con game the regime played on farmers, and the effect it’s having:
It appears the government persuaded farmers in cooperatives to accept cash in lieu of half of their annual in-kind grain allotment–then rendered the bonus worthless via the currency reform. Farmers are now hoarding grain however they can: The United Nations Development Program reports that post-harvest losses amount to 30%. The farm economy has been severely disrupted. But unlike the 1990s famine, which was largely an urban phenomenon and killed perhaps a million people, hunger is now reported in the countryside. [….]
A survey of 300 North Korean refugees conducted in November 2008 by Stephan Haggard of the University of California San Diego found that respondents were increasingly accessing foreign sources of news and disinclined to accept the government’s explanations, instead holding it responsible for their plight. The currency fiasco will accelerate these trends.
This seems like a good segue to quote Peter Beck’s latest op-ed, also in the WSJ. Peter Beck and I always seem to find things to agree on, despite our other differences. Here, he talks about the impact of clandestine broadcasting into North Korea:
Over the past several years, South Korean researchers have quietly interviewed thousands of North Korean defectors, refugees, and visitors to China about their listening habits. One unpublished survey conducted last summer of North Koreans in China found that over 20% had regularly listened to the banned broadcasts, and almost all of them had shared the information with family members and friends. Several earlier studies confirm these findings. [Peter M. Beck, Wall Street Journal]
I’d like to flatter myself that Peter’s coming around to seeing things my way when he calls for an expansion of broadcasting hours and budgets, knowing full well how much this will piss the North Koreans off and spoil the millieu for talks. But then, it’s now a matter of conventional wisdom that those talks aren’t going to achieve their original purpose anyway.
By the way, expect to see research published this year that says more North Koreans listen to foreign broadcasts than don’t have access to them, and that virtually all North Koreans who can listen to foreign broadcasts do. And that’s all I have to say about that for now, except that the evidence we have suggests that on several levels, the influence of Open News, Good Friends, the Daily NK, RFA, and Free NK Radio is rising as the information blockade crumbles.