Food
and stability in North Korea
Deprive
and rule
Why
does North Korea’s dictatorship remain so entrenched despite causing such
hunger and misery?
Sep
17th 2011
IF
NOBODY else, at least Kim Jong Il, North Korea’s leader, appears to have found
something to fill his belly with during the annual Chuseok harvest festival in
North Korea this week. “His face beaming with a smile,” as his propaganda
machine put it, he dropped into a shop in Pyongyang selling pancakes stuffed
with meat.
Outside
the capital there are few such treats. Much of the rest of the country is suffering
a severe food shortage, say aid agencies. On September 9th the UN’s World Food
Programme released video images from a trip to the North Korean countryside
showing listless orphans, their growth stunted by malnourishment. A cold start
to the growing season and summer flooding has badly damaged rice and maize
crops. Potato rations have been cut by a third, to two a person each day.
Mr
Kim’s regime, with customary cynicism, has told people to “simplify” their
dining habits at Chuseok this year “in the socialist way,” according to
DailyNK, a Seoul-based online news agency. Yet in his parallel universe, Mr Kim
boasted of the variety of beef, pork, goose and turkey available to the
privileged customers of the pancake shop. How does he get away with it? Loosely,
that is the question posed by North Korea-watchers trying to understand how an
odious regime has remained stable for so long, defying frequent predictions of
its downfall.
North
Korea should, by rights, be tottering under the weight of its spectacular
economic mismanagement. It is in the midst of a shaky succession process, which
is hard for any totalitarian regime, let alone one where the chubby
heir-apparent, Mr Kim’s son, Kim Jong Un, is little known or loved. The
country’s food crisis has its roots in (1) atrocious farm productivity, (2)
the high international price of grain, and (3) an embargo on much
food aid because of North Korean belligerence towards South Korea in recent
years. Although the public-distribution system for food has collapsed in much
of the country, the regime has tried, albeit imperfectly, to stamp out informal
markets, the only succour for many.
North
Korea has an economic lifeline to China, but scholars who have interviewed
North Korean refugees report contempt, tinged with envy, for their giant
neighbour. The North was once able to use promises to scrap its nuclear-weapon
programmes as a means to extort hard currency from South Korea, America and
Japan. No more.
The
Kim family brand of extreme, race-based nationalism has support in parts of the
capital, Pyongyang, with its goose-stepping parades and bombastic high-rises.
This, after all, is where the elites live, enjoying perks and protected by an
overwhelming security apparatus. Elsewhere in the country, the regime sees enemies.
With totalitarian obsession, it groups North Koreans into 51 social categories,
graded by loyalty to the regime. Of those groups, 29 are considered to make up
an underclass that is hostile or at best ambivalent towards the regime. Most of
these suspects live not in Pyongyang or even in lesser cities, but in the
countryside.
Some
people brave harassment and shooting to cross the border into China to earn
hard currency (many North Koreans, especially black-market traders, cross and
recross into China). Some children in the North live ferally: they are known as
kotjebi, or “fluttering swallows”, and roam in packs. When they cannot steal in
the markets, they eat dead dogs and rotten food (reportedly chewing toothpaste
in the belief that it prevents food poisoning). Many people, particularly
women, live dangerously off the black markets, which have flourished again
after an unsuccessful attempt to crack down on trade in hard currency. Most
endure hunger at least some of the time. So
why do they not revolt?
One
intriguing explanation comes from Go Myong-hyun, a statistician at the Asan
Institute for Policy Studies, which has just held a conference in Seoul on the
viability of the North Korean regime. On the basis of satellite imagery of crop
areas, vegetation and human settlement, Mr Go believes that both North Korea’s
crops and the population that tends them are more geographically scattered
than outsiders have hitherto thought. He contests UN estimates that over
three-fifths of the country is urbanised. That would require every farmer
to sustain nearly two city dwellers, which a shortage of fertiliser, farm
machinery and fuel precludes. Mr Go reckons that urbanisation could be as low as 25%, based on data from the
Global Rural Urban Mapping Project, a global population map. That would imply three
farmers for each city dweller. It suggests that, even though much of
the country is cut off from the food-distribution system, rural dwellers
survive precariously through subsistence farming.
Transport—or
rather the lack of it—may be another, unintended form of social control. North
Korea inherited railways from the former Japanese colonialists that run
predominantly up the west of the country. That is the more populated side: the
food-distribution system works better there than in the rural north and east.
Ahn Byung-min, of the Seoul-based Korea Transport Institute, has made 40-odd
trips to monitor the distribution of South Korean food aid. His photographs
show how decrepit the rail system is, with rotten railway ties, different track
gauges and bridges that are still pockmarked by bullets from the Korean war.
Yet communication by road is even harder, Mr Ahn says, which further isolates the rural areas.
Some cars have crank handles, or are powered by wood-burning stoves. He showed
a photo of one old truck stamped with a star for every 50,000km (31,250 miles)
on the clock. The stars added up to 1m km.
The
tentative conclusion is that North Korea has not only managed to cut itself
off from the world, but also created an internally isolated underclass,
mostly in the east, that is left to fend for itself. The underclass’s isolation
reduces the burden on the state—and the odds of it rising up in organised
fashion to challenge the regime.
---------
