North Korean Economy Watch

UNFAO
11/23/2004

Despite its best harvest in ten years, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) will post another substantial food deficit in 2005 and require external aid to support more than a quarter of its 23.7 million people, two United Nations agencies said today.

A report by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP) projected domestic cereals availability in the 2004/05 marketing year (November-October) at 4.24 million tonnes, including milled rice and potatoes – a 2.4 per cent increase on 2003/04.

However, it warns that insufficient production, a deficient diet, lower incomes and rising prices mean that 6.4 million vulnerable North Koreans – most of them children, women and the elderly – will need food assistance totaling 500,000 tonnes next year.

Good weather improves 2003 harvest

The 2004 rice paddy harvest was estimated at 2.37 million tonnes, up from 2.24 million tonnes in 2003, thanks primarily to favourable weather, a low incidence of crop pests and diseases, and improved irrigation in the country’s cereal belt. Maize output was unchanged at 1.73 million tonnes.

Forecasting total cereal needs for 2004/05 at 5.13 million tonnes, the UN agencies projected an import requirement of almost 900,000 tonnes. Given anticipated concessional and commercial imports of 400,000 tonnes, the residual gap will be about 500,000 tonnes.

Most of the 16 million people receiving subsidized cereals from the government-run Public Distribution System (PDS) averaging 300 grams per person per day – half a survival ration – cannot make ends meet. They turn to more expensive private markets yet “they are still not able to cover their basic energy requirements,” FAO and WFP said.

Despite good harvest, external food aid needed

The report, which followed a joint assessment mission by the Rome-based food agencies in September and October, says, “the continuing national shortage is still a problem” so “external food aid is in part seen within the context of overall domestic availability.”

It also noted that, increasingly, “the most critical problem for poor households is their lack of access to basic and nutritious food because of declining purchasing power.” As a result, assistance to the food-insecure population “should now be determined more by their household food gap than the national food gap in cereal production.”

“A balanced diet is out of reach for all but a few PDS-dependent households,” the report says. “The situation remains particularly precarious for children in kindergartens, nurseries, orphanages and primary schools, pregnant and nursing women, and elderly people.”

Price of food on new private markets up dramatically

While the prices of state-subsidized rice and maize rationed through the PDS have remained low and stable (at 44 and 24 won a kilo, respectively), prices in private markets have risen dramatically since the introduction of economic reforms in mid-2002.

Last month, rice cost as much as 600 won a kilo in such markets – almost 30 per cent of a typical monthly wage – compared to the 2003 average of 120 won; maize was 320 won a kilo, up from last year’s peak of 110 won. In September, one Euro bought 1600 won on the parallel market.

“The ability of low-income families to obtain food from the market is severely restricted due to their deteriorating purchasing power affected by under- or unemployment and sharp rises in food prices in the market,” according to the report.

An unintended consequence of reform has been the problem of higher food prices, which has been compounded by widespread and steep cuts in already meagre wage earnings as ailing enterprises in predominantly industrial DPRK shed labour.
Food rations meet just half a person’s minimum needs

The typical wage earner’s family now spends one-third of its monthly income on PDS rations that meet only half its minimum caloric needs. Another one-third is spent on non-food essentials – rent, heating and clothing. The remainder is insufficient to purchase enough food in private markets to meet the rest of the family’s very basic needs.

Much of the population, consuming very little protein, fat or micronutrients, suffers from critical dietary deficiencies. Fresh vegetables and fruit are either scarce or very expensive outside of the July-September period.

Traditional coping mechanisms such as animal husbandry, the cultivation of household gardens and hillside plots, the gathering of wild foods and transfers from relatives in the countryside, afford some relief to hard-pressed urban residents. Small-scale income-generating activities, notably petty trade and services, allowed under an easing of restrictions on private and semi-private enterprise are other sources of much needed income.

Better farm machinery and improved soil fertility needed

To deal with the chronic, structural food deficit, the FAO/WFP report recommended that the international community enter into a dialogue with the DPRK government toward the eventual mobilization of the economic, financial, and other resources needed to promote sustainable production and overall food security.

The report also proposed examination of investment projects on soil fertility and better farm machinery to allow further expansion of the country’s double-cropped area.

WFP has provided the DPRK with almost four million tonnes of food assistance, valued at $1.3 billion, since 1995.

BBC
Alex Kirby
8/27/2004

[NKeconWatch: Here is the report-  DPRK_SOE_Report.pdf]

The UN and officials in Pyongyang have agreed the first-ever assessment of the state of the North Korean environment.

The report was written by North Korea’s national co-ordinating council for the environment, together with the UN’s Development and Environment Programmes.

The head of Unep said Pyongyang had shown its readiness to work with the world community to safeguard nature.

The report lists a catalogue of neglect and over-exploitation of resources, and says time is short to put things right.

The report, DPR Korea: State Of The Environment 2003, was produced by officials from 20 government and academic agencies, with training and guidance from the two UN programmes.

Future collaboration

It was compiled as a result of a visit to Pyongyang in 2000 by Unep’s executive director, Dr Klaus Toepfer.

He and Dr Ri Jung Sik, secretary-general of the national co-ordinating council, have now signed a framework agreement on joint activities to improve environmental protection.

The report covers five areas: forests, water, air, land and biodiversity. It says the most urgent priority is the degradation of forest resources.

Forests cover 74% of North Korea, but almost all are on steep slopes. In the last decade the forests have declined in extent and quality.

The report says this is because of timber production, a doubling of firewood consumption, wild fires, insect attacks associated with drought, and conversion of forest to farmland.

On water it says demand is rising “with economic development and the improvement in standards of living”, and calls for urgent investment in domestic sewage and industrial water treatment.

It notes that large quantities of untreated wastewater and sewage are discharged into rivers, and says some diseases related to water use “are surging”.

Air quality, the report says, “is deteriorating, especially in urban and industrial areas”. Energy consumption is expected to double over 30 years, from almost 48m tonnes of oil equivalent in 1990 to 96 million tonnes in 2020.

North Korea’s use of coal is projected to increase five times from 2005 to 2020, underlining, the report says, “the urgent need for clean coal combustion and exhaust gas purification technologies, energy efficiency, and renewable energy alternatives.”

On land use, the report says self-sufficiency in food production has been a national policy aim in North Korea.

Changed priorities

But it continues: “Major crop yields fell by almost two thirds during the 1990s due to land degradation caused by loss of forest, droughts, floods and tidal waves, acidification due to over-use of chemicals, as well as shortages of fertiliser, farm machinery and oil.

“Vulnerable soils require an expansion of restorative policies and practices such as flood protection works, tree planting, terracing and use of organic fertilisers.
“Recognising such issues, [the country] adjusted its legal and administrative framework, designating environmental protection as a priority over all productive practices and identifying it as a prerequisite for sustainable development.”

North Korea is home to several critically endangered species, among them the Amur leopard, the Asiatic black bear and the Siberian tiger.

Squaring the circle

It has signed up to international environmental agreements such as the Convention on Biological Diversity, though the report notes a continuing “contradiction between protection and development”, which it says is being overcome.

In a wider context, the report says: “The conflict between socio-economic progress and a path of truly sustainable development is likely to be further aggravated unless emerging issues can be settled in time.”

It says environmental laws and regulations need to be formulated or upgraded, management mechanisms improved, financial investment encouraged, and research focused on priorities.

Dr Toepfer said North Korea “has shown its willingness to engage with the global community to safeguard its environmental resources, and we must respond so it can meet development goals in a sustainable manner.”

BBC
7/1/2004

A complex of ancient tombs across North Korea and China has been recognised by the UN’s World Heritage List.

Two sites from the Koguryo dynasty – one in each country – are recognised for their special cultural value. It is North Korea’s first entry on the list.

The UN’s cultural body, Unesco, says it is trying to balance the bias towards Western sites on the list so far.

Forty-eight sites are being considered for the list by the World Heritage Committee at a meeting in China.

Political agenda

The annual meeting, where the sites are being discussed, is taking place Suzhou and will last until 7 July.

An official said the final choice should be limited to 30, but political considerations may mean it exceeds that.

The Economist
3/11/2004

So far as a visitor can tell in this secretive land, North Korea’s economic reforms are starting to bite. But real progress will require better relations with the outside

COMMUNIST North Korea has started to experiment with economic reform, and opened its door a crack to the outside world. Though its culture of secrecy and suspicion stubbornly persists, it was deemed acceptable for your correspondent to visit Pyongyang’s Tongil market last week. Here, stalls are bursting with plump vegetables and groaning with stacks of fresh meat. You can even buy imported pineapples and bananas from enthusiastic private traders.

But how about a photograph? Most foreigners think of North Korea as a famished nation, and the authorities are evidently keen these days to tell the world about the great strides their economy has made since reforms were introduced in July 2002. Logic might seem to suggest that a snap showing the palpable result of the reforms would be acceptable too. But it is not. The officials were friendly but firm: no pictures of fat carrots.

The July 2002 reforms were ground-breaking for North Korea: the first real step away from central planning since the dawn of communism there in 1945. The government announced that subsidies to state-owned enterprises were to be withdrawn, workers would be paid according to how much they produced, farmers’ markets, hitherto tolerated, would become legal and state enterprises would be allowed to sell manufactured products in markets. Most of these enterprises, unless they produced “strategic items”, were to get real autonomy from state control.

Almost two years on, how to assess the success or failure of these reforms? That climate of secrecy makes it deeply frustrating. Even the simplest of statistics is unavailable. Li Gi Song, a senior economist at Pyongyang’s Academy of Sciences, says he does not know the rate of inflation. Or maybe he is not telling. After all, he says, “We can’t publish all the figures because we don’t want to appear bare before the United States. If we are bare then they will attack us, like Afghanistan or Iraq.” So what follows can be little more than a series of impressions.

The indications are that the reforms are having a big impact. For a start, North Korea has recently acquired its first advertisement (pictured above)—for foreign cars, assembled locally by a South Korean majority-owned company. Or, to be more basic, take the price of rice, North Korea’s staple. Before the reforms, the state bought rice from state farms and co-operatives at 82 chon per kilo (100 chon make one won, worth less than a cent at the official exchange rate). It then resold it to the public through the country’s rationing system at eight chon. Now, explains Mr Li, the state buys at 42 won and resells at 46 won.

North Korea’s rationing system is called the Public Distribution System (PDS). Every month people are entitled to buy a certain amount of rice or other available staples at the protected price. Thus most North Koreans get 300g (9oz) of rice a day, at 46 won a kilo. According to the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP), that is not nearly enough. Anything extra has to be bought in the market.

In theory, even in the market the price of staples is limited. Last week, the maximum permitted rice price was marked on a board at the entrance to Tongil as 240 won per kilo. In fact, it was selling for 250. WFP officials say that in January it was selling for 145 won, which points to significant inflation, for rice at least. This is not necessarily a bad thing, since it means that the price is coming into line with the market.

The won’s international value is also adjusting. Since December 2002, the euro has been North Korea’s official currency for all foreign transactions. In North Korean banks, one euro buys 171 won. In fact, this rate is purely nominal. A semi-official rate now exists and the price of imports in shops is calculated using this.

Last October, according to foreign diplomats, a euro bought 1,030 won at the semi-official rate. Last week it was 1,400. A black market also exists, in which the euro is reported to be fetching 1,600 won—which implies that the won is approaching its market level. It also means, however, that imported goods have seen a big price-hike. For domestically-produced goods, like rice, prices may well go on rising for a good while longer.

What about earnings? Before the 2002 reforms, most salaries lay in the range of 150-200 won per month. Rent and utilities, though, were virtually free, as were (and are) education and health care. Food, via the PDS, was virtually given away. Now, pay is supposed to be linked to output, though becoming more productive is not easy for desk-bound civil servants or workers in factories that have no power, raw materials or markets.

Rents and utilities have gone up, though not by crippling amounts. A two-bedroom flat in Pyongyang including electricity, water and heat costs just 150 won a month—that is, about a tenth of a euro.

Earnings have gone up much more: a waitress in a Pyongyang restaurant earns about 2,200 won a month. A mid-ranking government official earns 2,700. A worker at a state farm earns in the region of 1,700, a kindergarten teacher the same, and a pensioner gets between 700 and 1,500. A seamstress in a successful factory with export contracts can earn as much as 5,000 won a month. Since that seamstress’s pay equates to barely three euros a month, wages still have a long way to adjust.

The prices of food and other necessities, to say nothing of luxuries, has gone up much more than rent has. According to the WFP, some 70% of the households it has interviewed are dependent on their 300 gram PDS ration, and the WFP itself is targeting 6.5m vulnerable people out of a total population of some 23m. Not all suffer equally: civil servants in Pyongyang get double food rations from the PDS.

There are some encouraging stories. In Pukchang, a small industrial town 70km (40 miles) north-east of Pyongyang, Concern, an Irish aid group, has been replacing ancient, leaking and broken-down water pipes and pumps, and modernising the purification system. This has pushed the amount of clean water available per person per day from 80 to 300 litres. Kim Chae Sun is a manager at the filtration plant, which is now more efficient. Before July 2002 she earned 80 won a month. Afterwards she earned 3,000 won. Now she earns 3,500.

As Mrs Kim speaks, three giant chimneys belch smoke from the power station that dominates the town. All workers have been told they can earn more if they work harder, but certain groups have been told they will get even more money than everyone else. In energy-starved North Korea these include miners and power workers. Mrs Kim says her husband, who works in the power plant, earns an average of 12,000 won a month. Her rent has gone up from eight to 102 won a month, and in a year, she thinks, she will be able to buy a television or a fridge.

A lot of people, in fact, are buying televisions. The women who sell the sets from crowded Tongil market-stalls get them from trading companies which they pay after making a sale. The company price for an average set is 72,000 won, the profit just 1,000 won. After they have paid for their pitch, the traders can expect an income of 10,000-12,000 won a month.

Mystery sales
Which makes for a puzzle. Who can afford a good month’s salary for a locally made jacket in Tongil, costing 4,500 won? How come so many people are buying televisions, which cost more than two years of a civil-servant’s pay? How come the number of cars on the streets of the capital has shot up in the past year? Pyongyang still has vastly less traffic than any other capital city on earth, but there are far more cars around than a year ago. Restaurants, of which there are many, serve good food—but a meal costs the equivalent of at least a white-collar worker’s monthly salary. Many of these restaurants are packed.

Foreign money is part of it. Diplomats and aid workers say many new enterprises seem to have opened over the last year. Nominally they are state-owned, but sometimes they have a foreign partner, often an ethnic Korean from Japan. The majority are in the import-export business. Some have invested in restaurants and hotels and some in light industry. Thanks to the 2002 reforms, these firms have a degree of autonomy they could not have dreamed of before. An unknown number of people also receive money from family abroad, but there are still no North Korean-owned private companies.

Farmers are among the other winners: they can sell any surpluses on the open market. But two out of three North Koreans live in towns and cities, and only 18% of the country is suitable for agriculture. The losers include civil servants, especially those outside Pyongyang who do not get double food rations and have no way to increase their productivity.

Factory workers have it the hardest. A large proportion of industry is obsolete. Though Pyongyang has electricity most of the day, much of the rest of the country does not. Despite wild talk of a high-tech revolution, the country is not connected to the internet, though some high-ups do have access to e-mail service. In the east of the country lies a vast rustbelt of collapsing manufacturing plants.

Huge but unknown numbers of workers have been moved into farming, even though every scrap of available land is already being cultivated. The extra workers are needed because there is virtually no power for threshing and harvesting and no diesel for farm vehicles. This requires more work to be done by hand. Ox-carts are a common sight.

The innocent suffer
Markets are everywhere. But this does not mean that there is enough food everywhere. In Pyongyang, where there are better-off people to pay for it, there is an ever-increasing supply. Outside the capital, shortages are widespread.

No one knows how many died during the famine years of 1995-99; estimates range from 200,000 to 3m. In Pukchang, officials say that 5% of children are still weak and malnourished. In Hoichang, east of Pyongyang, schools and institutions tell the WFP that about 10% of children are malnourished. Masood Hyder, the senior UN official in North Korea, says that vulnerable households now spend up to 80% of their income on food.

And yet some things are improving. Two surveys carried out in 1998 and 2002 by the North Korean government together with the WFP and Unicef showed a dramatic improvement in children’s health between those years. The proportion of children who fail to reach their proper height because of malnutrition fell from 62% to 39%, and the figures are thought to be still better now. However, Unicef says that though children may no longer die of hunger, they are still dying from diarrhoea and respiratory diseases—which are often a side-effect of malnutrition.

To a westerner’s eye, a class of 11-year-olds in Hoichang is a shocking sight. At first, your correspondent thought they were seven; the worst-affected look to be only five. Ri Gwan Sun, their teacher, says that apart from being stunted some of them still suffer from the long-term effects of malnutrition. They struggle to keep up in sports and are prone to flu and pneumonia. They are also slower learners.

Pierrette Vu Thi of Unicef says that North Korea’s poor international image makes it hard for her agency, the WFP and others to raise all the money they need. The country is in a chronic state of emergency, she says, and to get it back on its feet it would need a reconstruction effort on the scale of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Such bleak talk is echoed by Eigil Sorensen of the World Health Organisation. He says that health services are extremely limited outside the capital. Medicines and equipment are in short supply, large numbers of hospitals no longer have running water or heating and the country has no capacity to handle a major health crisis.

None of this is likely to change very fast. With no end yet to the nuclear stand-off between North Korea and the United States, American and Japanese sanctions will remain in place. And nukes are only part of it. Last week the American State Department said it was likely that North Korea produced and sold heroin and other narcotics abroad as a matter of state policy. North Koreans who have fled claim that up to 200,000 compatriots are in labour camps. North Korea denies it all.

Reform, such as it is, has plainly made life easier for many. But rescuing the North would take large amounts of foreign money, as well as measures more far-reaching than have yet been attempted. At present, there is no way for the government to get what it needs from international financial institutions like the World Bank. Such aid as comes will be strictly humanitarian, and investment in so opaque a country will never be more than tentative. Domestic reform on its own cannot fix an economy wrecked by decades of mismanagement and the collapse of communism almost everywhere else.

According to the Washington Post:

A severe food shortage has crippled the U.N. feeding program that sustains North Korea’s most vulnerable and undernourished people, according to Masood Hyder, the U.N. humanitarian aid coordinator and World Food Program representative in Pyongyang.

He said his organization can now feed fewer than 100,000 of the 6.5 million people it normally does, many of them kindergarten-age children and pregnant women who cannot get what they need to stay healthy from the country’s distribution system.

The food shortages are likely to hang in the air as North Korean, U.S., South Korean, Chinese, Russian and Japanese diplomats gather in Beijing Feb. 25 to discuss North Korea’s incipient nuclear weapons program and respond to its demand for formal security guarantees and more economic aid.

Japan, for instance, used to provide 300,000 tons of food a year but has stopped shipments because of disagreement with Pyongyang over Japanese citizens abducted and taken to North Korea for training as spies in the 1970s and 1980s, the diplomat said.

South Korea and China run government-to-government aid programs for North Korea, outside the World Food Program, but the level of their current shipments is not known. Masood estimated that such aid is roughly equal to the multilateral aid administered by the U.N. agency for the neediest people.

The last shipment arrived in North Korea in September, when South Korea sent a boatload of corn, Masood said. The next shipment, 38,000 tons of corn from the United States, is due at the end of March, he added. The six-month break has dried up a supply chain crucial for more than a fourth of North Korea’s 23 million people, particularly those not given the benefits of the million-strong military and government employees.

“That means people are without food at the worst time, in the dead of winter,” Masood said. “A little slippage in deliveries, and it’s a tragedy.”

The shortages are not expected to produce widespread starvation of the kind that devastated parts of North Korea in the mid-1990s, according to U.N., Japanese and other Asian officials. But Masood predicted they will intensify and spread malnutrition. Food shortages already produce stunted growth in four out of 10 North Korean students and allow pregnant women to gain only half of the 22 pounds they are expected to gain to give birth to healthy babies.

This winter’s shortage is likely to reverse for many people the progress made since the disaster a decade ago.

Some orphanages have started serving two meals a day instead of three because of the shortages, Masood said. Although North Koreans traditionally eat rice as their staple, the U.N. program provides mainly wheat, corn and edible plant seeds, which are used to make bread or gruel.

Normal deliveries of such grains take about three months from the time a government decides to donate to the food’s arrival in North Korea and its distribution to areas where people are going hungry. The World Food Program has asked for 485,000 tons this year but has received less than a third of that in pledges — and a small fraction in deliveries.

Masood said his main hope is that food shipments headed elsewhere could be rerouted to North Korea or that the North Korean government could be persuaded to dip into its strategic reserves of rice and other food.

“Statistically, they have food,” the Asian diplomat said. “It depends on how quickly the North Korean government diverts food from some other groups.”

Reluctance to help North Korea this winter stems in part from donor governments’ traditional end-of-year budget pinches. But it also reflects frustration over Kim’s refusal to abandon the country’s nuclear program and unwillingness to allow U.N. or other outside inspectors to fully monitor what happens to the aid.

The secrecy has caused some donor governments to suspect that the food aid might be diverted to the military or government employees. Monitoring is “less than effective” because of the restrictions, Masood acknowledged. But he expressed skepticism that U.N. food was ending up in army or government cupboards because, he said, officials have first call on government-to-government aid and North Korea’s own rice harvest.

Another problem is that North Korean food shortages have become chronic over the last decade so they no longer cause alarm. As long as Kim’s government clings to a system unable to produce enough food, the Asian diplomat said, people wonder why their tax money should be spent to make up the difference.

According to the BBC:

More than six million North Koreans will go without emergency food aid until April, says the UN World Food Programme (WFP).  It has run out of food.

For the next two months food rations will only be given to 100,000 people – mostly child-bearing women and children in hospitals and orphanages. A quarter of the population who normally receive food aid will have to survive winter without normal rations.

Food shortages have plagued North Korea for at least nine years, after floods, economic mismanagement and the consequences of the break-up of chief donor the USSR combined to precipitate the crisis.

WFP Pyongyang representative Masood Hyder said the agency was scraping the bottom of the barrel. “If you’re going to give, please give early,” was Mr Hyder’s message to donor countries. He said the crisis had come at the “wrong time”, when harvest stocks were already depleted and recent economic reforms had forced up prices on farmers’ markets.

Mr Hyder blamed the funding shortfall on an unfavourable political context – a reference perhaps to North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, says the BBC’s Louisa Lim in Beijing – and donor fatigue with a country which has received food aid for nine years.

He responded to the charge that assistance from the WFP was contributing to a dependence on aid in North Korea. “Whenever humanitarian action is protracted these kinds of worries arise: ‘Are we the solution or have we become part of the problem?'” he told the BBC World Service’s World Today programme. “I think we’ve got to be quite robust in confronting these issues – so long as there are people in need … there is a strong case for the WFP to assist.”

The WFP representative said the current pattern of stop-go had begun in September 2002.  The worst until now had been an inability to feed half the people on the WFP’s books. “Now we’re talking of a total cutback,” Mr Hyder said. “It’s graver, with deeper consequences.”

“Right now we are in the situation where we will be unable to feed all 6.5million, perhaps we will be able to feed just under 100,000 in February and March, but the vast majority we will not be able to help,” he said.

Mr Hyder described the consequences as a real increase in suffering and malnourishment. “People are not really expected to die because of the short-term deprivations,” he said.  “People in fragile and recovering health… would then again suffer a setback.”

Underweight pregnant mothers were more likely to give birth to poorly developed babies, and many elderly people would be unable to buy food at the markets.

Though the US, Russia and other countries had pledged thousands of tonnes of grain and other food, the next shipments of aid will only arrive in North Korea in April. The WFP says it will face another crisis from June onwards.

From another article in the BBC:

The US gave 40,000 tonnes of food earlier in the year but said that no decision had been made on whether to send an additional 60,000 tonnes.

The WFP wants another $171 to refume the aid.

Washington Post
John Pomfret
1/27/2003, Page AOl

Nuclear Crisis May Have Roots in Economic Failure

Six months after North Korea announced unprecedented wage and price increases to jump-start its miserable economy, runaway inflation is emptying millions of pocketbooks and bottlenecks in production are causing widespread shortages, according to Chinese and North and South Korean sources.

The black market price of rice, the staple of the Korean diet, has jumped more than 50 percent over the past three months in most parts of the country while tripling in others, according to North Koreans, Chinese businessmen and Western aid agency workers. Some factories in poorer parts of the country, such as the heavily industrialized east coast, have stopped paying workers the higher salaries that were a cornerstone of the reforms, recent North Korean arrivals to China said. Others have taken to paying workers with coupons that can be exchanged for goods, they said, but there are no goods in the stores to buy.

“Theft new economic policy has failed,” said Oh Seung Yul, an economist at the government-funded Korea Institute for National Unification in Seoul. “The hopes that were raised in July are today pretty much dashed.”

The apparent failure of North Korea’s attempt to promote economic activity and improve living standards constitutes an important backdrop for its recent threats to resume a nuclear weapons program, according to the sources.

On one hand, Oh and others said, North Korea’s isolated government needed a scapegoat. On the other, according to Chinese sources close to the secretive government of Kim Jong Ii, Pyongyang has determined that it risks economic collapse without security guarantees and access to international lending institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, to which the United States holds the keys. So Kim manufactured a crisis to win concessions, they said.

“Now the economic situation is more precarious than before the reforms. They can’t do this halfway,” said Cui Yingjiu, a Chinese Korean economist and adviser to the North Korean government. “They risk social chaos and economic collapse.”

The crisis has been exacerbated by a drop in the humanitarian aid that had kept North Korea on life support since 1995. Because of a shortage of donations, the World Food Program has cut back the number of North Koreans it is assisting this year from 6.4 million to 3.5 million of the country’s estimated 22.6 million inhabitants. In September, the elderly and primary school-age children on the west coast were cut off. In October, kindergarten-age children, pregnant women and nursing mothers there lost out. In November, nurseries were scratched from the list.

“It’s a tough call deciding who has to be deprived,’ said Gerald Bourke, an official with the World Food Program in Beijing. Bourke said the recent “very rapid inflation” of rice prices is “putting food way beyond the pale for a lot of people.”

The World Food Program has 25,000 tons of food in North Korea and pledges of 75,000 additional tons, he said. It needs 511,000 tons this year.

North Koreans traveling over the border to Yanji, about 700 miles northeast of Beijing, said an initial wave of hope triggered by the changes announced in July is gone in almost all parts of the country except the capital, Pyongyang.

Lee Xiangyu, a North Korean refugee in China, was arrested by Chinese border police and returned to North Korea last summer, when the changes began. After a short stint in jail, the 19-year-old returned to her home town, Musan, along the border with China. By October, she said, the lumberyard where her father worked had stopped paying him and other workers the huge raises they had received as part of the effort to promote some aspects of a free-market economy.

But prices continued to rise. “There was no money in my house, and now the prices are so high,” she said. Lee sneaked back into China in December. “It’s not like it was in 1997 when people were starving to death,” she said, speaking of the famine that cost hundreds of thousands of lives. “But it’s worse in a way. Because everybody had hope for a little while and now they are desperate again.”

North Korea’s announcement of economic reforms was front-page news, in part because the measures fit into a series of other moves that led some observers to conclude Kim was ready to lead his country out of isolation. The steps included expression of regret following a clash between North and South Korean naval forces in June, the suggestion that North Korea would hand over Japanese Red Army members wanted in Japan for hijacking a Japanese airliner in 1970, an informal meeting in July between North Korean Foreign Minister Paek Nam Sun and Secretary of State Cohn L. Powell, transportation links between North and South Korea, a summit between Kim and Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and talk of establishing as many as five special zones for foreign investment.

The economic changes included raising prices and wages, devaluing the North Korean won against the dollar and cutting state subsidies for failing businesses. Wages were increased between 900 percent and 1,500 percent. Prices, which are in theory set by the state, went up as well. Rice went up 4,000 percent, corn 3,700, pork 700, diesel fliel 3,700, electricity 5,900, apartment rent 2,400 and subway tickets 900.

The government announced that factories with bloated workforces could effectively lay off unnecessary workers so they could concentrate on making things again — a step North Korean industry had not taken since economic troubles began in 1995.

The main motivation for increasing the price of rice was to prompt farmers to plant more food. But Cui, who attended a conference on North Korea’s economic changes last fall in Pyongyang, said farmers were not happy.

“Grain prices went up, but so did prices for inputs like fertilizers and seeds,” he said. ‘So all gains were canceled out.”

Another issue, Cui said, is electricity. North Korea has good hydropower resources, but as farmers become interested in planting more crops, they will want to use water in reservoirs for irrigation, not for power generation. “There are a whole series of these conundrums and Catch 22s,” Cui said.

He said North Korean factories have yet to begin producing goods people want to buy. That is why trucks rolling into China from the Dandong border crossing, 350 miles southwest of Yanji, now carry clothes, television sets, shampoo and other consumer goods.

The changes befliddled Western and Chinese economists from the beginning. Chinese experts noted that when China undertook its first major economic reform in 1979, it increased the price of grain by only 25 percent. Second, they said, when China began this process, 80 percent of its population lived in rural areas, so there was a huge pooi of potential beneficiaries from the liberalized agricultural policies. But North Korea is highly industrialized: Two-thirds of its people live in cities.

Marcus Noland, at the Institute for International Economics in Washington, speculated that the changes were either a desperate attempt to jump-start a half-dead economy or a backhanded attack against North Korea’s nascent private economy. Increasing prices would reduce the value of currency held outside the state system, breaking the back of private entrepreneurs.

But then again, he said in a recent paper, “the possibility that economic decisions are being made by people who do not grasp the implications of their actions should not be dismissed toohastily.”

Correspondents Doug Struck and Peter £ Goodman in Seoul contributed to this report

UNFAO
10/26/2001

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is likely to record its best harvest for six years, but with domestic food production still well below consumption requirements, the country will again need substantial external assistance in 2002, two United Nations agencies said today.

Favourable weather during the main growing season, bigger budgetary allocations for agriculture, greater use of farm machinery and increased supplies of donated fertiliser should enable DPRK to produce some 3.54 million tonnes of cereals in 2001/02 (including rice in milled terms and potatoes in cereal equivalent (2001/02), up 38 percent on the previous year’s harvest and its highest output since 1995/96, according to a report by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP).

Relatively good and well-distributed rainfall from mid-June to end-August benefited the main 2001 crops, overcoming the adverse effects of a prolonged spring drought, experts from the Rome-based agencies who undertook an assessment mission to the country from 25 September to 5 October concluded.

Rice production was forecast to reach 1.34 million tonnes (milled basis) in 2001, 22 percent more than last year, and the maize harvest projected to rise by 42 percent to 1.48 million tonnes.

The overall 3.54 million tonne estimate for 2001/02 includes yet-to-be-planted winter/spring wheat, barley and potato crops that in recent years accounted for 10-15 per cent of the country’s annual output. “The production estimate may need to be revised once the harvest outcome of these crops is known,” the FAO/WFP report noted.

But it pointed out that in addition to perennial droughts and floods, critical shortages of fertiliser, agro-chemicals and farm machinery persist, and there is little scope for expanding the cultivable area beyond its present level of some two million hectares.

Notwithstanding the significant recovery this year, “domestic production will fall well below the minimum food needs and the country will again have to depend on substantial external food assistance next year as its capacity to import commercially remains highly constrained,” the report said.

Estimating total cereal utilization needs in 2001/02 at 5.01 million tonnes, it therefore projected a deficit of 1.47 million tonnes (down from 2.2 million tonnes in 2000/01). “With commercial imports anticipated at 100,000 tonnes, 1.37 million tonnes will need to be covered by food aid and concessional food imports.”

On the basis of vulnerability assessments the report recommended that about 610,000 tonnes of food aid, including 525,000 tonnes of cereals and 85,000 tonnes of other food items be mobilised for population groups deemed to be most at risk: small children, pregnant and nursing women, and the elderly – especially in urban areas. It said bilateral aid and concessional food imports should meet the balance.

“The uncovered deficit is large and must be viewed very seriously. It needs to be emphasised that unless the international community responds positively and substantially, millions of people of DPR Korea, including large number of children, old people, pregnant women and lactating mothers will face hunger over prolonged periods with severe consequences for their health and welfare,” the joint report says.

“The crucial food aid safety net needs to be maintained until sustainable food security is achieved through the recovery of the economy and the rehabilitation of the agriculture sector, for which substantial international assistance will be needed,” the report concluded.

UNFAO
11/13/1997

Despite an improved harvest in North Korea, the country will enter 1999 with a large food deficit and will need to import 1.35 million tonnes of food grain, including 1.05 million tonnes as food assistance to meet the minimum nutritional requirements of the population, according to a joint report by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the UN World Food Programme (WFP).

The report, based on the findings of a crop and food supply assessment mission that toured the country extensively last month, forecasts North Korea’s cereal production for 1998/99 at 3.5 million tonnes, some 30 percent higher than last year’s severely reduced crop.

But this harvest is only enough to cover minimum consumption needs for eight months. Apart from foreign exchange constraints that limit commercial imports, the general economic decline in the country and natural disasters have seriously compromised national food security.

“The food situation in DPR Korea (North Korea) remains precarious and the country urgently needs to address the underlying problems in the economy and agriculture if it is to avert serious problems in the future,” said the assessment team leader Mr. Abdur Rashid.

The report recommends that out of the 1.05 million tonnes of food aid needed, some 480,000 tonnes be targeted mostly to children, hospital patients and pregnant and nursing women. The remaining cereal shortfall of 574,000 tonnes will be needed to help the general population meet its minimum needs.

The report calls for immediate attention to be “focused on improving agricultural input supplies, mainly fertilisers, spare parts and fuel” to “enable the country to produce enough food to meet its minimum needs.”

“It is imperative that the international assistance to agriculture be increased substantially from its current low levels,” the report said, because “future food security in DPR Korea (North Korea) will crucially depend on solutions that address the major economic difficulties. In the absence of these, even without natural hazards, the food supply situation will remain highly precarious as the productivity in agriculture falls and the capacity of the country to finance commercial food imports dwindles and barter trade becomes a progressively less viable option.”

“Despite favourable weather this year, food production has not recovered sufficiently enough to avert serious food shortages,” said WFP’s Senior Program Coordinator for North Korea, Mr. Saeed Malik, adding, “The food crisis has been compounded by a complete run-down of the country’s economy.”

The natural disasters that struck North Korea from 1995 to 1997, including two years of flooding followed by serious drought and a typhoon, aggravated the underlying structural problems of the economy. The situation worsened further with the loss of favourable economic ties with the former USSR and other centrally planned economies in eastern Europe which had provided North Korea with large amounts of aid and trade benefits.

Today, the agriculture sector faces a lack of spare parts for broken machinery, shortages of fuel, irrigation difficulties and a shortage of pesticides. But, the shortage of fertiliser is the most serious problem for domestic food production, according to the report. North Korea’s three fertiliser factories have a total capacity of over 400,000 tonnes of nitrogen nutrient which could be enough for self-sufficiency, but the factories are obsolete, poorly maintained and face shortages of spate parts and raw materials, mainly fuel, causing fertiliser availability for 1998 to dwindle.

“The capacity of North Korea to provide adequate food for its population is constrained by the shortage of agricultural inputs such a fuel and fertiliser needed to produce food domestically and the reduced capacity of the economy to supplement domestic food production through commercial imports,” said the report, adding: “Food security in the country critically depends on general economic performance and the efforts to increase domestic food production.”

Other recommendations in the report include:

· Rehabilitation and development of the irrigation system and improved water management;

· Crop diversification to enhance soil productivity and reduce risk of crop losses in any one year due to adverse weather conditions;

· Research into effective crop rotation schemes including legumes to promote soil fertility and productivity; and,

· Research on seed improvement, and early and short-maturing and less chemical fertiliser dependent crop varieties.

· In the context of these recommendations, the UN Development Programme-led Round Table in support of Agricultural Recovery and Environmental Protection is an important initiative towards a strategic approach.

UNFAO
11/9/1997

The nutritional situation in North Korea remains fragile in spite of the country’s efforts to redress chronic food problems, United Nations food agencies said today in their latest comprehensive food assessment report.

“Given the scale of the problem and its root causes, future food supply prospects are almost entirely contingent on international food and rehabilitation assistance, economic growth and the ability of the country to integrate itself into the global economy,” the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and World Food Programme (WFP) said in a report on their recent joint mission to North Korea.

“Failing these requisites, food availability and health and nutritional standards will continue to fall markedly,”

Living standards in North Korea have significantly declined in the last four years as the availability of food per person has shrunk, while serious health problems have increased because resources, drugs and essential supplies are unavailable. A vicious circle of poor nutrition compounding poor health and vice versa has become deeply entrenched, the report said.

“Widespread starvation has only been averted by concerted national efforts and the unprecedented volume of humanitarian food assistance provided by the international community,” according to the report.

The mission, which visited North Korea 9-19 October, said the food supply situation “will remain precarious over the next 12 months despite some improvement in rice production this year, due principally to increased fertiliser use, adequate irrigation supplies and the absence of serious pest and disease attacks.”

However, the report cautioned, the gains in rice production were more than offset by the reduction in maize output as the area cultivated fell sharply.

Based on population figures provided by North Korea’s government, grain demand for food and other uses for 1999/2000 is said to be 4.76 million tonnes. This leaves a deficit of about 1.29 million tonnes, of which the government is expected to import 300,000 tonnes commercially. A further 370,000 tonnes is covered by food aid imports in the pipeline, leaving 623,000 tonnes of grain that will need to come through assistance programmes. The food deficit has not significantly changed since the last year’s FAO/WFP crop and food supply assessment mission to North Korea.

According to the FAO/WFP report, there are signs that economic sanctions on North Korea by leading industrialized countries may be further relaxed, which could lead to recovery in the economy and rehabilitation in agriculture. “This inevitably will have a significant and positive impact on sustainable food security.”