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Category: Famine & Food Aid

February 12, 2013

Good Sanctions and Bad Sanctions

Weeks before North Korea’s latest nuclear test, it was clear that the political climate surrounding North Korea policy was ready for a big shift away from honor-system diplomacy and toward tougher sanctions.  This test is likely to mean a major legislative push here in Washington — not just to punish North Korea, but to craft and enact sanctions that attack the regime’s structural weaknesses, with the intent of either coercing its disarmament or destroying it.  For all the tension that will...
Categories Anju Links/Famine & Food Aid/Sanctions
January 14, 2013

North Korea Glasnost Watch: Kim Jong Un’s Border Crackdown Is Working

The most superficial things you’ve probably heard about Kim Jong Un are the closely related ideas that he is, or must be, a latent reformer because he (a) appreciates aspects of Western culture, (b) has a fashionable wife, and (c) had a Swiss education. As examples, I’ll cite this report by Jean Lee, this and this from Joohee Cho of ABC, and this exercise in straw-grasping by John DeLury. The problem with this theory is that it isn’t supported by any evidence that the...
Categories Border Control/Famine & Food Aid/Refugees
October 16, 2012

Reform Watch: North Korea can now afford to bury its orphans in Snoopy T-shirts

As a vibrant market economy arises from an underdeveloped one, it does not lift all boats as a rising tide would.  Some get very rich fast, and some stay very poor.  Such periods of rapid development are politically risky times, as uneducated masses are drawn away from their hardscrabble farm lives and packed into factory dormitories, slums, and shanty towns in the cities.  Those places become hothouses of envy and radicalism that can bring down the political systems in which...
Categories Famine & Food Aid/NK Economics
September 25, 2012

North Korean Reform Watch 6

We don’t know how extensive North Korea’s agricultural reforms are meant to be, but we do know that North Korea wants us to think that it’s instituting big reforms in its agricultural sector, because it took the AP’s Jean Lee on a show tour of a collective where the “farmers” were primed to tell her it was so. Is it too cynical of me to tend to disbelieve any fact that North Korea wants me to believe is true? Props...
Categories AP Watch/Famine & Food Aid/NK Economics
June 6, 2012

New Report Details North Korea’s Political Apartheid System

Today at 2 p.m., the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea will formally release its new report, “Marked for life: Songbun, North Korea’s Social Classification System.” Here is an extended excerpt: The songbun system in some ways resembles the apartheid race-based classification system of South Africa. Songbun subdivides the population of the country into 51 categories or ranks of trustworthiness and loyalty to the Kim family and North Korean state. These many categories are grouped into three broad castes:...
Categories Famine & Food Aid/Human Rights
May 23, 2012

In South Hwanghae, Echoes of the Holodomor

The Daily NK asks, fittingly, how there can be famine in the “breadbasket” — the rice bowl — of North Korea today, and adds that the reports of starvation are not easily attributed to natural causes. To North Korean defectors, it is clear that the civilian starvation is a direct result of the decision to prioritize the military under the military-first policy and the subsequent obligation on the part of cooperative farms to provide rice for soldiers, coupled to controls...
Categories Famine & Food Aid
May 20, 2012

Kim Jong Un Buys up Luxuries; Christine Ahn Attributes Famine, Cannibalism Reports to “Political Bias”

When North Korea tried and failed to launch its Unha-3 rocket this year, it not only chose that launch instead of a big shipment of American food aid as the price of keeping quiet until November, it also lost the six-month supply of grain it could have bought with the money it cost to build the damn thing to begin with. But it’s good to see that those choices haven’t cramped the lifestyles of any North Koreans fortunate enough to...
Categories "United" Nations/Famine & Food Aid/Sanctions/Useful Idiocy
May 14, 2012

North Korea Executes Three (We Know About) for Cannibalism

My first reaction to these reports years ago was skepticism, but if you hear enough people say the same thing (see here and here), you start to think they can’t all be lying: North Korea has held public executions of at least three people on charges of cannibalism in recent years, a South Korean state-run institute said Thursday, the latest development that could support what has long been rumored in the isolated country. There have been accounts among North Korean...
Categories Famine & Food Aid
April 25, 2012

AP Photographers Finalists for the Walter Duranty Prize

Via the AP’s exclusive reporting from Pyongyang, we learn today that North Koreans are happy people who love to dance and sing, and who have lots of bread to eat at picnics! So what’s all this nonsense about starvation and food aid I keep hearing? As you can can see, no one needs food aid here, except when they do! I feel sorry for the less fortunate people who live in places without their own memorandum of understanding with the...
Categories AP Watch/Famine & Food Aid
March 15, 2012

WaPo Editors, Andrew Natsios on the Post-Groundhog Day Agreement

I’d say it’s more than slightly significant to see the editorial page of the Washington Post accusing Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton of (as Robert Gates put it) buying the same horse all over again: Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was careful not to oversell the agreement, calling it “a modest first step in the right direction. Officials said it would allow inspectors to get a first look at the uranium enrichment facility constructed at Yongbyon while letting the...
Categories Diplomacy/Famine & Food Aid
January 19, 2012

Agreed Framework III Watch

There isn’t much to say about this that I haven’t already said so many times that I’m tired of saying it: North Korea on Wednesday signaled a willingness to freeze its uranium enrichment program in exchange for “confidence-building” incentives from the United States such as a suspension of sanctions and a resumption of food aid. The statement, carried by North Korea’s state-run news agency and attributed to a foreign ministry spokesman, was the first sign that North Korean heir Kim...
Categories Diplomacy/Famine & Food Aid/Six-Party Talks
July 19, 2011

Reunifying Korea, One Shot at at Time!

You may remember that several years ago, a liquor distributor in the United States tried to introduce North Korean soju into the U.S. market. That effort failed long before President Obama reimposed trade sanctions on North Korea, partially because of the importer’s legal troubles, but probably also because the stuff supposedly tasted awful. Apparently, North Korean consumers share that assessment, because the same brand of South Korean soju that once kept me fully occupied as a prosecutor and defense counsel...
Categories Famine & Food Aid/NK Economics/Subversion
July 15, 2011

Exclusive: Kim Jong Il Buys More Stuff You Can’t Eat!

By now, it seems clear that South Korea, Japan, and the United States will all refuse to contribute food aid to the World Food Program. Contributions from the EU, Sweden, and even China are minuscule in comparison to the WFP’s appeal, and to the amounts that the United States was providing during the Clinton and Bush Administrations, before North Korea itself rejected further aid out of apparent spite. Republicans who dominate the House again are dead-set against giving aid this...
Categories Famine & Food Aid
July 2, 2011

Interview: Marcus Prior of the World Food Program, on Food Aid to North Korea

This week, the Christian Science Monitor’s veteran Korea correspondent, Don Kirk, reported that U.S. and South Korean officials disagree with the World Food Program’s assessment that North Korea is on the verge of a food crisis: “There’s a need, but we don’t know how great it is,” says a knowledgeable western observer. “My hunch is it’s less about a shortage of food and more about unequal distribution. You can buy rice in the markets if you have the means. He...
Categories Famine & Food Aid/Interviews
June 27, 2011

Clandestine Footage Shows Starving Soldiers in N. Korea

This comes to us via the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. There’s no embed link, but you can watch it here. It’s consistent with other recent reports from North Korea, some of which suggest that even elite units are underfed. Note that when the soldiers get hungry, they head straight for the markets to expropriate food from the traders. This helps explain why the regime tolerates markets, and it also adds to our suspicion that whatever food aid we distribute will be...
Categories Famine & Food Aid/NK Military
June 1, 2011

Tapdancing to the Graveyard

If we are to believe the International Business Times — and I’ve allowed the temptation to do so overcome my better judgment — North Korea ranks itself the second-happiest nation in own global Happiness Index. I realize that reactions to this news may vary. You may be thinking that it’s an honor just to be nominated. Others will wonder which camp are the judges in now. One observer correctly notes that “[n]othing says happy like government-issued proclamations of happiness.” But...
Categories Famine & Food Aid/Sanctions/WTF?
April 25, 2011

Even the North Koreans think Jimmy Carter is a tool.

I seldom find myself agreeing with the North Koreans on much, but it gives me strange comfort to find that they share my contempt for America’s worst ex-president: In a memoir about her months as a prisoner in North Korea, Ling records that North Korean officials were infuriated by her suggestion that Carter be enlisted as the high-profile American to come retrieve her. They viewed Carter as washed-up and out of office for too long — a retread unfit to...
Categories Anju Links/Famine & Food Aid/Useful Idiocy
February 24, 2011

Is the paradigm shifting on hunger in North Korea? (Also, fiskings of Chris Hill and Selig Harrison)

OFK regulars should all know how much regard I have for Christopher Hill. So are my own preconceptions causing me to find something vaguely repellent in the way Hill frames the issue of food aid, or do others see things the way I do? Would food aid help to ensure the survival of a state whose treatment of its own citizens is among the most abysmal in the world? If so, and if denying food aid would result in a...
Categories Famine & Food Aid/Fiskings/Useful Idiocy