Winter Blues: Behind North Korea's blustery façade is a population on the verge of starvation
In the North Korean city of Chongjin, destitute citizens practice the rituals of fear with nearly religious fervor. The air-raid sirens sound regularly, signaling residents to block their windows with blankets and stay indoors. Local officials make sure every household has stashed emergency supplies in rucksacks in case the call comes to evacuate to underground shelters carved into a nearby hillside. An essential item is the homemade gas mask that women sew from plastic bags and strips of cloth. North Koreans have no duct tape.
They are accustomed to warnings that the American bombs could at any moment begin falling on them like rain. North Korean despot Kim Jong Il presides over a ragpicker's Sparta where 22 million people are conditioned to believe they are always on the precipice of war. But daily propaganda broadcasts have been more hysterical of late. A woman who fled Chongjin for the relative haven of China three weeks ago says the standoff with the U.S. over the North's nuclear-arms program has everyone mindful of Kim's dictum that "the earth doesn't need to exist if there is no North Korea." The woman's daughter recently came home from school in tears: "Her teacher told her war could break out in three days."
State-sponsored paranoia has an Orwellian purpose. Fear occupies the mind, distracting North Koreans from their chronic hunger and the fact that there is less to eat now than there was six months ago when the nuclear crisis began. U.S. officials, seeking leverage to force Kim to abandon his nuclear-weapons program, have for months been mulling ways to impose new economic sanctions that would cut off the North from sources of hard currency, such as its international arms sales. After the North in January withdrew from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the matter was referred to the U.N. Security Council, but it is not yet on that body's agenda. Last week, Japanese government officials indicated that if Pyongyang provokes its neighbors by test-firing a ballistic missile, Tokyo could help sponsor a new "coalition of the willing," including the U.S., that would crack down on the North through sanctions—with or without the imprimatur of the U.N. (Japanese and U.S. officials later denied that such a plan was in the works.)
Even though there is now no unified effort to squeeze the North, shortages are growing worse. Refugees and traders who regularly cross its border with China say some regions of North Korea are once again threatened by a famine like the one that killed an estimated two million people in the mid-1990s. The country's failed Stalinist economy has a gross domestic product that is less than 5% of neighboring South Korea's. Desperate economic reforms last year cut subsidies to factories, increased wages and raised food prices, but so far the only result has been inflation. The country is woefully short of electricity needed to run irrigation pumps for agriculture and lacks cash to buy fertilizer. North Korea—which ostensibly hews to an isolationist policy called juche, or self-reliance—has been surviving on international food handouts for almost a decade.
But the belligerence of North Korean leaders and heavy demand for assistance by other countries, such as Afghanistan, have resulted in a sharp slide in food aid reaching the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK). Last month, the U.N.'s World Food Program (wfp), one of the North's largest aid providers, had so little grain it could feed only a third of the 4.2 million children and others it says need help the most. Meanwhile, the North Korean government's own food-distribution agency is able to provide only 270 grams of food per person per day—less than half what is considered sufficient to survive. The U.S. last December halted fuel-oil shipments to the North after its nuclear weapons program was revealed. The Bush Administration insists it is not cutting off food for fear of sparking a humanitarian crisis, but donations have been reduced until there is better monitoring to ensure it is getting to the neediest people. Japan, which shipped 600,000 tons of rice through the wfp in 2000, suspended shipments in 2001 and refuses to restart them. The European Union, too, has reduced donations since the nuclear crisis began. "This country is in a very desperate situation," says Rick Corsino, the wfp's North Korea director. "It's very, very vulnerable at the moment to any external shocks."
Even South Korea, which has been trying to maintain friendly relations, is reducing handouts. After funneling at least $2 billion in aid and investment to the DPRK over the past five years, it plans to ship only 100,000 tons of grain this year, a quarter of last year's largesse, although a plan to give more is under consideration. "Although we pursue the present policy of engaging the North significantly, it is hard to pursue it vigorously if North Korea is not responding constructively or positively in renouncing its nuclear-weapons development," says Lee Tae Sik, South Korea's Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
