FAMINE IN NORTH KOREA: Markets, Aid, and Reform
by Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland
Columbia University Press ₤22.50, 368 pages

During one visit to Pyongyang, I was having dinner with some North Korean officials when one noticed I was not eating the beef laid out in front of us at the garishly decorated foreign currency restaurant. Learning that I was a vegetarian, he responded with a laugh: “You’d fit right in here - there’s never any meat around.”

It was a sick joke. He was making light of one of the most tragic events of recent history - the man-made food shortages that killed as many as one million North Koreans during the 1990s and continue to consign millions to extreme hunger.

Before the Korean peninsula was divided almost six decades ago, the mineral-rich north was the industrial powerhouse, the more arable south was the rice bowl. After the Korean war, the communist north provided food for its people by relying on barter trade with the Soviet Union and the support of China.

But in the 1990s this geographical inheritance collided with the collapse of the Soviet Union, devastating floods and - mostly disastrously - decades of misguided economic policies to cause one of the most destructive famines of the 20th century.

“The ultimate and deepest roots of North Korea’s food problems must be found in the very nature of the North Korean economic and political system,” Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland write in Famine in North Korea.

Haggard is an international relations specialist at the University of California, San Diego, and Noland an economist based at the Institute for International Economics in Washington. They present a rigorous study of the causes of the famine, the role of humanitarian organisations and changes in the North Korean economy as a result of the disaster, although many of their recommendations would bring a smile to neoconservatives’ faces.

They also consider how the recurrent food shortages play into the security equation and political dynamic on the Korean peninsula, an especially topical issue now that diplomatic efforts to resolve the nuclear crisis are gathering pace.

Although the famine is now over, its legacy and the factors that caused it continue to remain a key preoccupation for the international community. Not only do North Koreans continue to suffer from severe food shortages, but Kim Jong-il’s regime still prefers to invest in a nuclear programme rather than feed the people.

As a result of the famine, the average seven-year-old boy in North Korea now weighs 9kg less and is 20cm shorter than his South Korean counterpart.

“An entire cohort of children was consigned to a myriad of physical and mental impairments associated with chronic childhood malnutrition,” the authors write. “The state’s culpability in this vast misery elevates the North Korean famine to a crime against humanity.”

The book is framed by the authors’ relatively hardline approach - they take seriously the argument that a country ruled by a regime that has acted with “systematic recklessness and callousness” should not be assisted at all.

However, Haggard and Nolan argue that there is little evidence that denying food will lead to regime change. This is, after all, a dynasty that has survived the collapse of the communist bloc, the death of its founder, a nuclear crisis and years of famine. They conclude that there is no substitute for a policy of seeking to aid the people while encouraging the regime’s political and economic evolution.

Amid this history of neglect, hunger and cruelty, there has been one element of hope. The famine led to the emergence of markets as people sought to buy the food the state no longer provided, and this precipitated the introduction of some half-hearted economic reforms.

The emergence of markets is often associated with leadership decisions - such as in China in the 1970s. But the authors argue that North Korea’s 2002 reforms that liberalised wages and prices merely formalised changes that had taken place as a result of the famine.

Given that the regime had used the public distribution system to control food - and therefore the people - this marketisation “. . . struck fear into the hearts of the political authorities, who saw it as opening a wedge for the emergence of an economy and private sphere beyond the clutches of the state”, the authors say.

As such, the reform process has been reluctant at best. But Haggard and Noland write that the development of a functioning economy that generates enough foreign currency earnings to buy the food is the key to resolving North Korea’s food shortages.

Convincing North Korea to do anything - whether it is to develop its economy, feed its people or relinquish its nuclear ambitions - is a goal that has frustrated diplomats for more than a decade. But all three factors are intertwined, this book suggests.

A diplomatic breakthrough on the nuclear problem would be likely to lead to financial support from countries including the US and membership of international financial institutions, which would probably help Pyongyang to start developing its economy and viewing reform more favourably.

“Economic integration also plays a key role in broader political strategies of engagement,” Haggard and Noland write. “Economic incentives not only build trust and signal peaceful intent but also have direct effects on both the economy and polity that may mute the propensity for conflict and foster change.”

As North Korea’s neighbours and the US struggle to convince Pyongyang that it is in their interest to dismantle its nuclear programme, such a prediction certainly provides food for thought.

Anna Fifield is the FT’s correspondent in South Korea.