North Korea Says Bumper Crop Justifies Limits on Aid

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October 6, 2005
North Korea Says Bumper Crop Justifies Limits on Aid
By JAMES BROOKE
ONJUNG-RI, North Korea, Sept. 29 - Against a yellow sea of ripening rice, red flags flapped smartly in the autumn breeze on a recent day, apparently signaling that collective farm work brigades were harvesting a bumper crop in this fertile corner of North Korea.

"All people in the D.P.R.K. are now out to give helping hands to the farmers in harvesting," the Korean Central News Agency said of the fall harvest campaigns around this nation, formally called the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. After a decade of reliance on food aid, Kim Jong Il, the North Korean leader, had declared 2005 to be "The Year of Agriculture."

But the trundling tractors, hard-working peasants and marching soldiers with harvest baskets on their backs could also have been staged to impress two busloads of journalists who sped along a highway, heading toward South Korea. Separated by a six-foot-high fence and blanket restrictions against interviews with farmers, the visitors had no way of getting a closer view of food supplies in this secretive society.

After mass mobilizations of workers in June to plant rice, North Korean officials now say that their overall crop is up 10 percent over last year's yield. With memories fading of the famine that killed as much as 10 percent of North Korea's population of 22 million in the 1990's, according to estimates by international organizations, officials now cite this year's bumper rice and corn crops to justify new restrictions on foreign aid and foreign aid workers. Famine death tolls range from 1 million to 2.5 million, a figure cited at a recent conference on North Korea in Washington by Andrew S. Natsios, administrator of the United States Agency for International Development and the author of the book "The Great North Korean Famine."

By the end of this year, the World Food Program of the United Nations, source of 90 percent of the aid here, is under orders from North Korea to shift from direct food to development aid. In addition, new government policies dictate that all foreign personnel from the 12 private aid groups operating from Pyongyang, the capital, are to leave the country.

"Dec. 31 is the deadline for all internationals to have left," Padraig O Ruairc, country director for Concern Worldwide, a private group based in Ireland that works on water, sanitation and midwife projects in North Korea, said by telephone from Pyongyang. Aid groups, he added, "are getting refusals for their field visits."

"There are a lot of indications that this is serious," he said.

North Korean officials say they want private aid projects to continue, but they want resident foreigners to leave, returning occasionally to monitor the work. Under those conditions, Mr. O Ruairc and Jérôme Bossuet, country director for Triangle Génération Humanitaire, a French group, predicted that most aid groups would wind up their projects and leave.

Oversight by resident foreigners is essential for aid programs to continue, said David Hill, North Korea representative for the European Commission Humanitarian Office. Speaking from Pyongyang, he estimated that his $21 million annual budget provided most of the funds for nine of the private groups here.

"Our prime requirement is that our partners are present on the ground, permanently," Mr. Hill said. Noting that talks are under way with North Korean officials to save the aid programs, he added, "Brussels is not going to shift on permanent residency."

Richard Ragan, an American who runs the World Food Program in North Korea, faces a different challenge: repackaging a program that helps to feed 6.5 million people as development aid.

Until now, the agency has avoided describing its aid here as development assistance, largely out of fear of alienating its largest supporter, the United States.

Now, to maintain this flow of food deemed vital to the most vulnerable one third of North Korea's population, United Nations officials are saying it was development aid all along. Mr. Ragan said he was now engaged in "a repackaging exercise."

"We have been dressing up development aid as humanitarian aid," Mr. Ragan said by telephone from Pyongyang. "There has been a reluctance by the donors to say they are doing development assistance."

His food-for-work program helps to build infrastructure, he said. His 19 "food enrichment" factories employ 2,100 people, largely women, making noodles, biscuits and drinks made from a blend of corn and soy beans. The program sponsors lectures by nutritionists.

"Out of the half a million tons we bring into the country every year, 75 percent is for classical development assistance," he said of food rations paid to workers on infrastructure projects. "Anytime you are in a situation with a chronic food problem for a number of years, the humanitarian and the developmental aspect blur."

After a year of hints, North Korea's policy changes were adopted at the cabinet level last summer, Mr. Ragan said. With talks continuing with North Korean officials and with the three primary donor nations, the United States, Japan and South Korea, he said he did not know what his program would look like next spring.

"After 10 years, the North Koreans were concerned about creating a culture of dependency," he said. But, he added, if the crop is up by 10 percent, North Korea will still be short 700,000 to 800,000 tons.

In New York, Jan Egeland, the United Nations emergency relief coordinator told reporters on Sept. 23, "Abruptly halting humanitarian assistance programs at the end of the year would be potentially disastrous for the millions of people who benefit from the humanitarian assistance including food and medicines provided by the United Nations."

His organization estimates that 7 percent of North Koreans are starving, and 37 percent are chronically malnourished. According to United Nations statistics, 40 percent of the children suffer from stunted growth, and 20 percent are underweight. The average 7-year-old boy is 7 inches shorter and 20 pounds lighter than his South Korean counterpart.

North Korea's deputy foreign minister, Choe Su Hon, said at a news conference in New York on Sept. 22 that because of his nation's "very good farming," the situation had improved "to a great extent."

Another reason for the termination, he said, is the attempt by 13 countries, especially the United States, "to politicize the humanitarian assistance" by linking it to human rights.

Jay Lefkowitz, the American envoy on human rights in North Korea, suggested on Sept. 8 that the Bush administration would review whether to link food aid to changes in North Korea's human rights practices.

A private bipartisan group that is considered the leading American group on the issue, the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, recently issued a report, "Hunger and Human Rights: The Politics of Famine in North Korea," that said "up to half of aid deliveries do not reach their intended recipients," but instead might be diverted for sale.

At the Washington conference, Mr. Natsios said continued American aid was contingent on the presence of the World Food Program staff in North Korea. "If the World Food Program leaves, we're leaving," he said.

The shift from food to development aid comes as North Korea's government grapples with a politically powerful anniversary 10 years after the 1995 floods that set off the years of famine, said Stephen W. Linton, chairman of Eugene Bell Foundation, a Washington-based private group that aids 44 North Korean hospitals and tuberculosis centers.

"I have never seen any evidence that North Korea wanted to become a permanent ward of the international community," Mr. Linton said by telephone. Noting that the foreign aid groups pay a price by agreeing to only have non-Korean speakers in Pyongyang, he said, "I would much rather send in Korean-speaking delegations than have someone living in Pyongyang who makes trips to the countryside with an official interpreter."

The attention given to the fate of a dozen European aid groups, said Mr. Linton, a Korean-speaker, overshadows "the absolute boom" in private aid from South Korea. The South Koreans, he said, will have a much greater and more fundamental impact on North Korea "than foreigners who run around in S.U.V.'s and do not speak the language."