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Tuesday, November 23, 2010

UN answers North Korea’s neutrons-over-nutrition policy with ... food aid

UNITED NATIONS — In the midst of severe food shortages affecting perhaps a quarter of the population, to the backdrop of horrific human rights abuses, and in the shadows of an expanding and costly nuclear weapons program, the United Nations has responded to this dangerous situation inside North Korea with both carrots and sticks.

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South Korean trucks carrying flour for North Korean flood victims drive past a military checkpoint near the inter-Korean border in Paju, in September.  AFP/Jung Yeon-Je

First, the carrots. UN humanitarian agencies have warned that approximately five million North Koreans face food shortages, “despite a relatively good harvest.” An assessment by the Rome-based World Food Programme found that the country confronts a 542,000 ton food deficit. The relief agency recommends sending 305,000 tons of food aid to the most vulnerable population.

“The cereal rations provided by the Government through its public distribution system would likely contribute about half of the daily energy requirements,” advised Joyce Luma, WFP chief of food security analysis. She added, “A small shock in the future could trigger a severe negative impact and will be difficult to contain if these chronic deficits are not effectively managed.”

WFP adds that in recent years cereal production in North Korea has “stagnated at around 4.5 million tons annually, compared to the 5.3 million tons” needed.

Food shortages are nothing new in communist North Korea; they are usually blamed on the weather or natural calamity. Yet the problem remains the rigidly applied socialist system where farm collectives do not produce; similar to Mainland China in the 1950’s and 1960’s. China has changed. North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-il runs a neo-Stalinist regime frozen in time but making a risky and uncertain leadership transition to his son.

In fact the epic famine of the 1990’s still lurks in recent memory. As specialist Jasper Becker recounts in his riveting account Rogue Regime; Kim Jong-il and the Looming Threat of North Korea, “The World Food Program (WFP) began by appealing for 21,000 tons of food for 500,000 people in 1995, and three years later it was feeding 8 million people, nearly half the population.” In the 1990’s between 2 and 3 million people died.

Fast forward to 2010. The WFP states soberly,” North Korea’s economy has been growing at a sluggish pace of under one percent annually and for many years now has suffered significant food deficits,” warns an economist with the Food and Agriculture Organization, who adds “the performance of the important agriculture, forestry and fisheries sector has been erratic with negative annual growth rates in the last years.”

The contrast is all the more glaring when you consider that on this same relatively small peninsula there is an abundance of food and prosperity in neighboring South Korea.

Now, the sticks. Human and political rights have fared no better. A tough UN resolution on the Situation of Human Rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) has passed a General Assembly committee with over 100 votes in favor and 18 against including the People’s Republic of China, Indonesia and Myanmar/Burma.

Significantly co-sponsored by Canada, the European Union states, Japan, South Korea, and the United States, the resolution “expresses its serious concern at the persistence of continuing reports of the systematic, widespread and grave violations of civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights” in the DPRK including “torture. inhuman conditions of detention…public executions. imposition of the death penalty for political and religious reasons… collective punishments, large number of prison camps and the extensive use of forced labor.”

The UN resolution equally decries DPRK restrictions on freedoms of movement, religion and forced abortions and gender-based discrimination, international abductions (usually Japanese nationals) and the “prevalence of chronic malnutrition.”

The quaintly-titled Democratic People’s Republic of Korea regime has long-pursued a policy of neutrons over nutrition, a cruel contradiction in the lexicon of the communists themselves. Indeed the UN Security Council has regularly slapped Pyongyang’s political wrist but the nuclear weapons program continues unabated.

Let’s face it. Once the DPRK diplomatically hoodwinked the Clinton Administration through the Geneva “Framework Agreement” in 1994, the cat was out of the proliferation bag. The North relentlessly pursued the nuclear genie until it finally developed an atomic bomb. When the device was tested in October 2006, coincidentally on the very day the South Korean Ban Ki-moon was elected as UN Secretary General, it was too late to turn back the atomic clock.

Now diplomats nervously debate what the nuclear North may do, humanitarian workers try their best to help its starving people but not the rulers, and Pentagon planners peer into the DPRK’s darkest reaches to gauge the scope of the nuclear threat.


John J. Metzler is a U.N. correspondent covering diplomatic and defense issues. He writes weekly for WorldTribune.com.

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