Starving off-camera

Christian Century, July 2, 1997 by Jonathan Frerichs

Visitors see children scavenging kernels of corn from the dirt under railway cars, but just as they reach for their cameras a railway guard shoos the children away. Visitors see a severely malnourished infant in a hospital, but are escorted from the building before they can inquire further. They see homeless people in public--a rarity in a country where housing and jobs have been tightly controlled by the state. The visitors, sent by the emergency aid coalition called ACT, are there on behalf of U.S. and international church aid agencies.

Can a country be on the brink of famine but have a government that is too proud to ask for food effectively? In North Korea, that is the dilemma of the day, the month and the year. Even for those not burdened by politics, figuring out how to help is proving difficult. The government is refusing to allow the grim photos that have usually shaped the international dynamics of disaster relief. Foreign reporters are granted only very limited access. Hungry citizens decline to be photographed, even by aid workers who visit with official blessing. "North Koreans will not beg in the streets for the benefit of your cameras," a foreign ministry official told the ACT delegation.

Until the collapse of the Soviet Union and other post-cold-war changes, North Korea had an economy that fed, clothed and housed its people. A national ideology of self--help and self-reliance guided citizens to provide for their own needs by their own work. Help comes from within, that ideology said, not from the outside world. Success in self-reliance helped the North Korean people exorcise the indignities of decades of Japanese occupation. The leader in this national crusade, Kim Il Sung, attained a status of great honor that adorned his Mao-like mantle of authoritarian infallibility.

With the disintegration of the communist world, however, the harsh determinism of a new economics shook North Korea to its roots. Trade with the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and China dried up or required precious hard cash in place of barter. Aid and credit in the name of socialist solidarity disappeared along with the allies who provided it. North Korea, with Cuba, became the remnant of a discredited and vanished system.

Grain harvests held steady through 1993, but the agricultural base was vulnerable. Only 20 percent of the land is arable. To keep yields up, imports of fertilizer were needed.

Then came three "acts of God": in 1994, hailstorms; in 1995, floods; in 1996, more floods. The 1995 floods were the worst--striking at the nation's granary and reducing harvests to less than half the 1993 levels. Purchases of grain from China and Thailand came nowhere near to making up for failed harvests. The same is true this year. The 1 million tons of needed grain are nowhere in sight.

After the flooding, in an effort to ease shortages of food and income, the government began allowing small shops and markets to operate outside the state economy. Some state-owned farms were subdivided into more efficient units. The barter of dried fish and scrap metal was encouraged to bring in more cereals from China.

But major relief measures have proven much more difficult. Hobbling if not blocking either massive aid or long-term improvements in the food supply is a web of political isolation and enmity. In North Korea, the record of self-reliance makes it hard for officials to ask for outside help, according to Hannelore Hensle, the emergencies director of the German Protestant aid agency Diakonisches Werk. "In a way," she says, "the North Koreans are prisoners of the conviction that We can do it ourselves.'" Adding to the dilemma is their reluctance to re-examine the legacy of "the Great Leader," Kim Il Sung--both out of respect for the past and out of caution about the present regime of his son and heir, "the Dear Leader" Kim Jong Il. "There is a firm reluctance to say: This is it. We have failed," says Hensle.

In South Korea, an official separateness and the habit of mutual suspicion constrain aid to the North. The relative lack of help from this close neighbor is "beyond comprehension" to Victor Hsu, East Asia director for Church World Service and a veteran of ten years of visits to both South and North. Hsu points to the 10 million Koreans who have relatives on both sides of the north-south border, the private and church initiatives that are sending some aid north, and the fact that even South Koreans who are hardline anticommunists are saying South Korea must help. But the South Korean government has made good on only part of a pledge of aid to North Korea through the UN World Food program.

The official South Korean stance is especially important because both Japan and the United States appear to be taking their cue from that quarter. Much like south Korea the U.S. has concerns about North Korea's nuclear program, its missile exports and its military intentions, and these concerns take precedence over disputed claims of food shortages. A U.S. government delegation to North Korea can come to different conclusions about humanitarian aid than the recent ACT team, or earlier United Nations delegations. A U.S. Agency for International Development visit in May reported that North Korea can survive until the next harvest in October. The AID official in charge of humanitarian aid is quoted as saying that North Koreans are coping better than expected by foraging for edible plants and bartering scrap iron with the Chinese (USA Today, June 18). For those who share such assessments, the U.S. offer of $25 million this year is judged to be adequate. The recent church visitors would disagree about the level of need and also about the apparent link between hunger and politics. "We cannot wait for `good government' when people are hungry," says Hensle. "Political differences are legitimate grounds for negotiation, but that is an agenda separate from food."