The North's Bitter Harvest

Two

weeks ago, Kang bribed North Korean and Chinese border guards, and crossed the Tumen River to China from the North Korean frontier town of Hoeryong. Like hundreds of refugees who flee totalitarian North Korea every year, Kang has plenty of reasons to leave family and home, but one gnaws at her: hunger. Kang (not her real name) says she has been surviving on corn and noodles for the past few months. With planting season in the North just beginning, food stores are short and many townspeople aren't getting enough to eat, she says. North Koreans used to be able to go to China to forage for extra food or, like Kang, to make a little money. But after Pyongyang ordered a crackdown on border jumpers earlier this year, few people dare to attempt the crossing. "Everybody's scared," Kang said by phone from a safe house near the border. "Things are much more difficult now."

Kang and millions of her fellow North Koreans are the overlooked victims of the Korean peninsula's nuclear crisis. It has been nearly one year since North Korea walked out of the six-party talks, the multilateral forum that was created to persuade Pyongyang to give up its nuclear weapons ambition. Last week, there was another round of unproductive exchanges: after a meeting with North Korean officials in New York, the U.S. State Department announced that the North would be returning to the negotiating table. A day later, North Korea denied making that commitment. North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Kim Gye Gwan told an ABC television-news crew in Pyongyang that the country was producing more nuclear bombs. Meanwhile, a meeting between South Korean President Roh Moo Hyun and U.S. President George W. Bush, despite declarations of unity, ended with the two allies unable to agree, as usual, whether to coax North Korean despot Kim Jong Il with aid and trade or hammer him with tougher economic sanctions.

Now, partly because of the diplomatic gridlock, a new crisis is looming. The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) recently warned that North Korea, a country where U.N. agencies estimate that more than a third of young children are chronically malnourished, could be on the brink of another deadly food shortage. Food aid has propped up the North since the mid-1990s, when famine killed between 1 million and 3 million people. But major contributors, including the U.S. and Japan, are reluctant to keep feeding North Korea while Kim refuses to relinquish his nuclear arsenal. The WFP is trying to provide for 6.5 million people in the country, says Richard Ragan, head of the WFP's relief operation in North Korea. But donations from governments have withered by more than half since 2002, and the agency will be forced to halt food supplies to nearly 3.6 million people this month, Ragan tells TIME by phone from Pyongyang. "We are inching back toward the precipice," he says.

North Korea is sending disturbing signals. Pyongyang recently reduced the daily rations of cereals it gives to most citizens to 250 g, half the minimum needed for survival. Thanks to market reforms implemented in the past few years, more North Koreans have been able to supplement dwindling government handouts by buying food at private food markets. But reforms have also caused food prices to soar. The price of rice has doubled in the past year, putting it out of reach of most families. Millions of urban North Koreans have reportedly been sent into the countryside to help with spring planting. Pyongyang's propaganda arm recently released photos showing military officers standing beside rice paddies in which volunteer field laborers toiled. Messages exhorting citizens to donate night soil blare from loudspeakers on trucks that drive around cities and towns. The country desperately needs fertilizer to maximize yields, but nobody can meet the unrealistic human-waste production quotas, so they mix ash with their contributions, according to refugees.

The risk now is that history will repeat itself. Responding to the crisis of the 1990s was made immensely difficult by Pyongyang's secrecy. By the time the extent of starvation was known by the outside world, it was too late. Significant U.S. food aid didn't arrive until late 1997, when the famine had already peaked. The specter of emaciated North Korean children once again threatens to complicate efforts to maintain stability on the peninsula. Trying to pressure North Korea by cutting off aid has in the past had little apparent effect on Pyongyang's policies and tactics. Kim's regime shrugs off the suffering of its citizens and the government has proved surprisingly resilient. China, the North's ally and biggest trading partner, keeps the regime supplied with aid and trade. If geopolitics once again gets in the way of feeding the hungry, says Nam Sung Wook, a North Korea expert at Korea University, "it's average North Koreans who are going to get squeezed."

Washington insists it won't use humanitarian aid as a stick to prod Pyongyang back to the negotiating table. "The President has always made clear that food shouldn't be used as a diplomatic weapon," said White House spokesman Scott McClellan last week. The U.S. sent more than 500,000 tons of food aid in 1999, but last year it pledged just 50,000 tons, and has yet to promise any new food aid this year. (U.S. officials complain that Pyongyang still isn't allowing adequate international monitoring to ensure food goes to the needy.) Meanwhile, South Korea, too, has been stingier with the North of late. Seoul shipped 1.2 million tons of rice to Pyongyang over the last three years, plus another 300,000 tons of corn through the WFP. This year, it hasn't sent anything. South Korean opposition lawmaker Won Hee Ryong last week accused Roh's government of using food aid as a political tool. "Do we really want a nuclear-free Korea without the Kim Jong Il regime at the cost of millions of dead?" Won asked. "North Korea is always an ethical quagmire," says Peter Beck, head of the International Crisis Group in Seoul. "Humanitarian aid is one of the only leverage points the Bush Administration and the Roh administration have."

If options are limited for Washington and Seoul, they are worse still for North Koreans. During the famine of the 1990s, tens of thousands of them survived by escaping to neighboring China, with some finding their way to new lives in South Korea. In recent years, an underground "railroad" run by human-rights activists, defectors and people smugglers has ensured a steady stream of North Koreans are able to flee. A record 1,894 refugees arrived in South Korea in 2004, many brought out by family members who had already made it to the South, according to NGOs.

But last year, China and the North acted to reduce the outflow. The crackdown apparently began after 468 asylum seekers who had holed up in Vietnam were airlifted to Seoul. North Korea broke off talks with officials from the South, tightened its border controls and increased executions of those accused of people smuggling, according to NKNet, a Seoul-based NGO. China has also beefed up its border patrols, according to refugees. Last October, the Chinese government was operating half a dozen detention facilities inside military bases near the frontier and was repatriating up to 300 North Koreans every week, according to a confidential study by South Korea's National Human Rights Commission whose contents were revealed to TIME.

Only about 300 North Korean refugees made their way to South Korea in the first four months of this year, a drop of almost 40% from the same period in 2004, according to activists (Seoul stopped releasing statistics on refugees earlier this year, citing security concerns). But tighter border controls aren't the only reason fewer North Koreans are getting out. Since the airlift from Vietnam, South Korean officials have publicly discouraged organized efforts to help North Koreans leave. Seoul has also tightened screening of asylum seekers and reduced cash settlements for newly arrived defectors from $36,000 to $20,000, money that many used to rescue relatives stuck in North Korea and China. "The government is trying so hard to discourage defectors from coming to South Korea," says Park Sang Hak, an activist with the Democracy Network Against North Korean Gulag, a Seoul-based NGO. "They are telling us: 'You are not welcome here anymore.'"

South Korean officials insist the new measures are aimed at protecting North Koreans from unscrupulous people smugglers. But the policy shift has once again put Washington and Seoul at cross-purposes—legislation passed by Congress last year seeks to lend more assistance to refugees. President Bush is expected in the next few weeks to name a special envoy for North Korean human rights. State Department and Congressional sources say the odds-on choice is Jay Lefkowitz, a lawyer who played a major role in shaping Bush's policy on stem-cell research.

It's unclear whether the U.S. and South Korea will be able to agree on a common strategy for dealing with the North. The worry among those eager to supply aid to the North is that diplomatic infighting could cause critical delays in averting the food crisis. "If you let things slide, it can go south really quick," says Ragan from the WFP. The world was taken by surprise during the 1990s famine. "We don't have any excuse for letting it happen again," Ragan says. Then again, neither does Kim Jong Il.