An Interview with Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland
Joseph Stiglitz has called Famine in North Korea “The authoritative account of the famine, examining its origins and impact from the level of the individual household to the high politics of international diplomacy. It is an extraordinary book, essential reading for anyone interested in the issues of famine, economic transition, and the future of the Korean peninsula.” The following is an interview with the authorsnnQuestion: You estimate that up to a million people died in the great famine of the mid-1990s. The numbers are staggering; how could the government have allowed this to transpire?nnStephan Haggard and Marcus Noland: Famine is commonly thought of as occurring when there is not enough food to go around, and shortages do play a role. But as Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, who contributed a foreword to the book, has observed, distribution matters. The official explanation for the famine is that North Korea experienced devastating floods in the mid-1990s. The famine was, in effect, a natural disaster. However, food supplies had begun dwindling and mortality rates creeping up before the floods. The rigidly authoritarian regime made little effort to offset declining harvests either by purchasing grain in the world market or appealing for humanitarian assistance, and when push came to shove, the residents of the capitol, Pyongyang, received privileged access, while some provinces were cut off from grain supplies from the state-run public distribution system altogether, and were later denied aid when it began to arrive. The government was centrally culpable in this disaster.nnQ: A theme of the book is the difficulty the humanitarian community has in dealing with such a hard state. How does the North Korean government get away with this?nnSH & MN: The North Korean government holds its population hostage to the humanitarian values of the international community. The World Food Program and other relief groups had to negotiate for entry, even as people were starving, and more than a decade later, they remain tightly constrained in their access and activities.nnEffectiveness was also impeded by the shifting political winds in the donor countries, which behaved generously when they felt aid could be useful in supporting diplomatic negotiations, while restricting aid at other times in response to North Korean provocations. Similar problems of coordinating how to engage North Korea persist to this day, with China and South Korea pushing for greater and less conditional support, while Japan and the United States take a harder line.nnQ: What about the critique by some exiles that aid simply props up the government?nnSH & MN: We take this critique quite seriously. Aid was channeled through the public distribution system, which was directly controlled by the government. And we provide evidence that aid was diverted, although probably to the market as much as to military authorities or the party. Yet we conclude that withholding aid is not likely to change the behavior of such a regime substantially and would only have adverse humanitarian effects.nnQ: Well if aid was diverted, what did people do to survive?nnSH & MN: Sadly, many did not. The state’s failure to provide during the famine forced families to pursue a variety of coping strategies, including foraging and eating inferior foods. Markets began to develop spontaneously, as out of desperation families began selling their belongings and trading for food. Work units also engaged in similar activities, even stripping assets to barter for food in China. These activities began a process of informal marketization of the economy from below, with potentially profound implications for the society.nnQ: You mentioned China. Is it possible that North Korea could pursue Chinese-style reforms? What is the North Korean government doing to ensure that this tragedy never happens again?nnSH & MN: Unfortunately, the government’s stance has been ambivalent. Although it may seem counterintuitive, for a country like North Korea, with relatively little arable land and inauspicious conditions for growing food, the long run solution to the food problem is to export minerals and manufactures, and import bulk grains—just like its neighbors China, South Korea, and Japan do. Yet the government appears to fear greater openness, and its actions have been tentative and contradictory. During the past year it has undertaken reforms to facilitate things like foreign investment, yet at the same time it has acted recklessly with respect to the food economy, trying to ban the private market in grain—through which most households actually get their food—expelling some NGOs, and greatly restricting the activities of the WFP.nnQ: Your book went to press before the most recent agreement with the North Koreans through the Six Party talks. Does your book provide any insight into how these negotiations might play out?nnSH & MN: One can glean several lessons from the book. First, the North Korean government makes concessions when conditions are bad, but when conditions improve, it will try to claw back those concessions. Second, it is prepared to act with startling ruthlessness in the pursuit of its core political goals. Third, divergent political interests among donors, or in this case, diplomatic counterparts, can undermine effectiveness in dealing with North Korea. While we welcome the recent progress in the talks, to employ a football metaphor, the February agreement was a first down, not a touchdown. We are still far from achieving our ultimate goal of the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.
