The Hidden People of North Korea: Everyday Life in the Hermit Kingdom

by Ralph Hassig

  Rations were discontinued during the famine because of temporary economic conditions, but the Economic Management Improvement Measures of July 2002 formally ended the ration system except as it continued to provide for the top one or two million cadres. So much farm production was being illegally diverted to the markets, rather than dispatched to the PDS, that the system was near collapse. For example, the state paid farms 0.8 won for a kilogram of rice and sold it to those with ration coupons for .08 won. The same rice was available for purchase in the markets at around 45 won per kilogram. Farms could thus earn far more by illegally selling their crops in the markets than by selling to the government. After July 2002, the government paid 40 won for a kilogram of rice and sold it in the PDS for 44 won, which was approximately the going rate in the markets, but inflation soon raised the market price.

  In March 2003 the prohibition against selling rice and other rationed items in the markets was lifted, and the government began referring to the markets simply as “markets” rather than “farmers’ markets.” Farms were no longer required to sell most of their crops to the state. After reimbursing the state for its costs (amounting to about 50 percent of the harvest), farming collectives were permitted to dispose of the remainder of their crops in the markets. Prices of food in the markets were supposed to be capped at approximately the PDS rate, but this did not happen. Over the next few years, prices continued to climb, even though wages, when they were paid, remained the same. In 2007, at the average monthly salary of 5,000 won, a person could buy six kilograms of rice, equivalent to ninety cups of cooked rice—if all the household income was devoted to food. Without an income source outside of the assigned workplace, starvation was almost inevitable. According to defectors, after July 2002, people spent as much as 80 to 90 percent of their income on food, compared to next to nothing when the rationing system was in place.48 Clothing was the second largest expense, followed by housing, heating, electricity, and then miscellaneous government fees, including education expenses.

  Food prices fluctuate according to how much food is in the market, rising in early spring after most of the fall harvest has been consumed and peaking in early summer before the barley harvest. Prices also reflect how much food aid North Korea is receiving because, even if most of the aid doesn’t go to ordinary people, the aid going to the upper political class and the military takes pressure off the food system and lowers prices in the market for everyone else. Because of transportation difficulties, prices also differ among provinces, with the lowest prices in farming areas and along the Chinese border. A class of entrepreneurial traders has sprung up to take advantage of these price differences by trucking rice and other products from one locale to another. Some of these traders operate on their own, and some work for party, state, and military organizations. “First runners” bring large quantities of goods from China to North Korean border cities. “Second runners” buy smaller quantities of these goods for a few hundred dollars and sell them to small-time entrepreneurs operating stalls in local markets.

  In addition to food imported from abroad, North Koreans have increasingly depended on food grown on small patches of private and semiprivate land. In 2004, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) cabinet issued instructions on land use that included this key provision: “Measures shall be worked out to allocate arable land to organizations and enterprises and have them resolve food shortages for their workers and office employees on their own.”49 This directive ignored the fact that few workplaces have any experience in farming; moreover, allocated farmland is often some distance from the workplace. After paying all expenses, many organizations hardly break even in the farming business.

  In small towns and in the countryside, people grow food in garden plots and public land that they appropriate secretly or by bribing the officials in charge of land usage. The legal size of kitchen gardens has been expanded from one hundred to one thousand square meters, although most gardens are smaller than that. In these gardens, which serve the same purpose as the “victory gardens” tended by Americans during the two world wars, farmers conscientiously grow vegetables such as beans, cabbage, radishes, peppers, garlic, potatoes, corn, and pumpkins. Houses in the countryside are covered with vegetable vines and surrounded by edible plants, while in the fields of collective and state farms, the crops are thin. Individuals and organizations seek out “patch fields”—small abandoned plots of land—and farm these as well, although they have no legal right to do so. When they are called to account by a party or government official, a small bribe usually settles the matter. To prevent thieves from raiding garden plots, farmers sleep outdoors next to their crops as harvest season approaches, and collective farms post guards.

  Chronic Food Shortages

  Reliable statistics are hard to come by, but the high point of domestic grain harvests apparently occurred in the 1980s, with production in the range of five to six million tons.50 Since the early 1990s, grain production has slipped to three to four million tons, which is one to two million tons short of the minimum domestic demand.51 When foreign aid donations do not make up for the shortfall, people simply starve. Food was not plentiful in the 1960s, 1970s, and into the 1980s, but most people had enough to live on and even enjoyed the occasional extra dish. By the late 1980s the food supply was dwindling, and in the early 1990s, the government launched a “Let’s Eat Two Meals a Day” campaign. The worst period of hunger, at least since the end of the Korean War, was from 1995 to 1999, when anywhere from twenty-five thousand people (an overly conservative estimate) to three million people died of hunger and illnesses caused or worsened by malnutrition. The most credible estimates fall in the range of six hundred thousand to one million, constituting 3 to 5 percent of the population.52 To put these figures in perspective, a comparable death rate in the United States would translate into nine to fifteen million people dying of hunger over a three-year period. If the higher estimates of two to three million North Korean deaths are closer to the truth, the comparable death tolls for the United States would be thirty to forty-five million dead.

  The reasons for North Korea’s chronic food shortages are not hard to find. Agricultural productivity is sapped by lack of incentives for farmers and the severe limitation that centralized socialist economic management imposes on agriculture (and the rest of the economy, for that matter). Localities have gained more responsibility for making agricultural decisions, but they are still supposed to implement the central government’s plans, usually without adequate resources. Kim Jong-il and his economic officials are unable to resolve food-shortage problems without abandoning the centralized socialist model that enables them to exert a large measure of control over the people.

  The land and climate also limit how much food North Koreans can grow. The northern half of the Korean Peninsula is mostly hilly and mountainous. In 2001, for example, North Korea had cleared 1.57 million hectares of farmland, 15 percent more than South Korea, but probably produced only 3.9 million tons of grain compared to South Korea’s 6.2 million.53 In order to expand agricultural land, hillsides have been extensively terraced, a practice that leads to soil erosion during the heavy summer rains. Authorized logging for export and unauthorized logging to provide fuel for heating homes worsen the erosion problem. The temperatures in the north are lower than is ideal for growing rice, and the North gets less rainfall than the south. In short, looking at topography and climate alone, trying to be self-sufficient in food production may be a losing battle in North Korea.

  North Korean fields are overused. For years, fertilizer helped keep them productive, but with little money to import fertilizer and with domestic fertilizer factories idled, productivity has plummeted. Until recently, the South Korean government donated several hundred thousand tons of fertilizer to the North annually, or the situation would be even worse. Electricity is often unavailable in rural districts, limiting the use of pumps to irrigate fields. Farm machinery has not been replaced for years, and in any case there is little fu
el to run it. According to a United Nations report published in South Korea in early 2005, only 60 percent of North Korean farm tractors are operational, and over half the land is being tilled by hand or plowed by oxen.54 Shortages of trucks and fuel make it difficult to get crops to market before they spoil. In addition to fertilizer, farmers need more insecticides and plastic sheeting to cover seedbeds in the springtime.

  In the 1990s, when the PDS ran low on food, the government simply cut off food deliveries to large groups of people living in the remote countryside. Foreign food-aid monitors are prevented from traveling to some of the remoter areas, especially in the northeast part of the country, so conditions there must be gauged by testimony from North Koreans who defect or travel to China. The people of Pyongyang receive the best food rations, but even during the famine some of them died of hunger.

  During the famine, those who had money went to the markets and paid high prices for what was available. City residents asked relatives who lived on farms to send them food, for which they traded household possessions. They also went on the street to beg, and some turned to burglary, robbery, swindling, and prostitution. People living in the countryside cultivated whatever small plots of land they could find around their homes and in the mountains. They also cut down trees and sold them as firewood. One defector tells how people would spend a day in the hills cutting trees (an illegal activity) and then walk ten hours carrying the wood on their backs to sell in the nearest city for enough money to buy a bowl of noodles and a half dozen cups of corn. In the last stages of hunger, people went into the woods and fields to pull up grass and peel bark off trees, then ground this material up and mixed it with a little grain. These alternative foods wreak havoc on the digestive system while supplying little nourishment.

  The short-term consequences of the food shortages are easy to see, but one can only guess the extent to which the chronic food shortages will physically and mentally weaken the North Korean people in the long term. As one visitor observed, “Nobody is apple-shaped or pear-shaped. Everyone is banana-shaped.”55 Those who are most immediately affected are the young and the old. In late 1998, at the end of the three-year famine period, a survey of children from age six months to seven years, sponsored by the World Food Program (WFP), found 16 percent wasting, 62 percent stunted, and 60 percent moderately underweight.56 A WFP survey in early 2005 found 7 percent of sampled children under the age of six to be wasting, 37 percent stunted, and 23 percent underweight.57 After the age of six, stunting is largely irreversible, which accounts for the difference in height and weight between North and South Koreans. By their size, North Korean children look several years younger than their South Korean counterparts, and throughout their lives these undernourished children are likely to suffer from a mental and physical “disease burden.”58

  The reality of the suffering of millions of North Koreans is better delivered by photographs of severely malnourished children and their gaunt parents than by looking at tables of statistics, and to truly appreciate what the chronic food shortage means to millions of North Koreans, one must skip a few meals and then imagine what it must be like to live with that feeling of hunger for years on end. One defector told a pathetic story about how the regime prepared a small delegation of students to meet a famous South Korean radical student, Im Su-kyung, who traveled illegally to North Korea in 1989. The members of the North Korean welcoming delegation were housed in a Pyongyang hotel for a week before the visit and fed meat, bread, fresh fruit, and milk to fatten them up for the meeting with the South Korean.59

  Although North Korea had been receiving an undetermined amount of food assistance from its socialist allies for much of its history, in the mid-1990s, and especially after the floods of 1995, the Kim regime began to appeal to the international community for food aid. Since that time, the major sources of food aid have been the WFP, which channels aid donations from member countries, and the ROK and Chinese governments. WFP aid started in 1996 and continued annually with about one million tons a year. In addition to providing annual food shipments, the WFP, with a resident staff of about one hundred at its highest point, set up nineteen factories to manufacture high-nutrition food such as biscuits and noodles. A rough estimate is that during this period the WFP was feeding about 6.5 million North Koreans (i.e., almost a third of the population), with the target population being children, pregnant mothers, and the elderly.

  The first South Korean delivery of aid, 150,000 tons of rice, was made in 1995, after which about 100,000 tons of grain and 300,000 tons of fertilizer were sent to the North every year until 2008, when the North Korean government froze all relations with the South Korean government to protest the election of its new president. American food aid, mostly delivered through the WFP, began in 1996 and peaked in 1999 with 695,000 tons, before declining. By 2007, the total American contribution was just over two million tons, at a cost of about $700 million.60 In 2008, the United States pledged another five hundred thousand tons of food aid, but not all of it was delivered.

  The WFP has frequently argued with the North Korean government about how to keep track of donated food in order to ensure that it goes to the deserving poor. WFP monitors are required to put in a travel request a week or more in advance before making a trip outside of Pyongyang, thus giving local officials plenty of time to prepare for the visit and set the stage for whatever play they want to perform—whether to make things look bad in the hope of getting more aid or good to indicate that progress is being made. Monitors are accompanied by North Korean security cadres, and the WFP is generally not permitted to bring Korean-speaking aid workers into the country, presumably for fear they will learn too much about North Korean society. Aid workers must therefore rely on North Korean government translators to speak with the people, and needless to say, no North Korean is going to speak candidly in the presence of a government official. To someone unfamiliar with North Korea, these government restrictions might seem extraordinary, but the WFP dares not object too strongly for fear of being prevented from delivering any food aid at all.

  Much of the donated food is transported by the military, the only organization with sufficient fuel and operating trucks to move large amounts of goods around the country. At every step of the way, beginning at dockside, military and party organizations have the opportunity to siphon off some of the aid for their own consumption or to sell in the markets, but it is not known how much of the aid is diverted. Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland, who have provided a balanced and well-researched view of North Korea’s food situation, cite estimates that 10 to 30 percent of the aid is not making it to its intended destination.61 On numerous occasions the WFP has vigorously denied that significant amounts of food are being diverted, but in the absence of a more rigorous monitoring system, this defense lacks credibility. Staff from other aid organizations, which find it impossible to insist on stricter monitoring while the bigger WFP accepts the Kim regime’s restrictions, have been anonymously quoted as taking a more pessimistic view of the diversion situation. One says, “Everything is a lure and a facade here!” Another says, “We still don’t have a minimal degree of transparency.”62

  One policy that the WFP has firmly adhered to is to distribute aid only to areas where it is possible to send monitors. This means that large swaths of North Korea, primarily in the East and Northeast, have never received WFP aid because the North Korean authorities refuse to let monitors visit those areas, ostensibly for security reasons. In an attempt to discourage diversion of food aid to the wealthier classes, the WFP has substituted corn and other less desirable grains for rice, on the principle that only poor people would be willing to eat those grains, although unscrupulous people could still sell the grains in the markets.

  In late 2004, the North Korean government placed further restrictions on food monitoring, explaining, implausibly, that local residents found the monitoring trips too “intrusive,” whereupon the WFP reduced its food distributions by 20 to 30 percent. In October 2005, the North Kore
an government requested that the WFP close its local food factories, suspend its food distribution, and send its workers home by the end of November, claiming that there was now enough food coming in from domestic and other foreign sources (presumably directly from South Korea and China). At the same time, the government said it would welcome “development-oriented” assistance.63 Most other aid organizations received the same expulsion notice.

  In November 2005, Kim Young-hoon of the (North) Korea Rural Economic Institute told the ROK minister of unification that if South Korea continued to deliver food aid for one or two more years, the North would then be able to “resolve the food issue.”64 Worse than wishful thinking, this was a lie. The WFP and other NGOs pleaded with the North Korean government to let them stay, and foreign human rights activists criticized the Kim regime for its wanton disregard of people’s needs, prompting the regime to assert that choosing not to receive humanitarian aid was its “sovereign right” and insisting that the government “has a way to overcome its difficulties, as they are temporary.”65 However, as the 2005 harvest (which was indeed somewhat larger than in previous years) was consumed, reports of hunger surfaced, and the regime was forced to relent. After lengthy negotiations, the WFP was permitted to return to North Korea in May 2006 with a dramatically scaled-down program.66