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The World Today
NORTH KOREA: Dying for Rice
By Hazel Smith
At the start of the twenty-first century, children in north Korea continue to face death from severe malnutrition. Women do not have rice to feed their babies because the world would rather donate surplus American wheat. US assistance has helped tens of thousands who would otherwise have starved. But food aid now needs to be fine-tuned, more targeted and directed less by the Department of Agriculture whose priority is the interests of American farmers and more by USAID.
United States food aid flows into north Korea through the UNıs organisation, the World Food Programme (WFP), at a cost of $160 million a year. It is the UNıs biggest food aid programme. By late last year, although there were signs that wholesale famine had been averted, there was little evidence that the scale of malnutrition differed significantly from that found in a 1998 international survey.
At that time, a staggering thirty-five percent of boys aged twelve to twenty-four months, and twenty-five percent of girls of the same age, were wastedı. This technical term accurately evokes the suffering of acute malnutrition where lack of food combined with disease and illness threatens life unless there is urgent medical intervention. Survivors may be permanently physically and mentally damaged.
By last year, the humanitarian agencies had a more nuanced understanding of the health and nutritional status of children. This compared with the earlier snapshot of acute and urgent suffering on television, showing skeletal youngsters in nurseries and hospitals. Some severely malnourished and many chronically malnourished children are still visible because of three key problems.
The challenges now are the lack of appropriate foods for young babies; the inability of international aid to reach children not in nurseries, kindergartens and schools; and the specific difficulties of the ten thousand living in orphanages.
All this is compounded by a lack of reliable information about the health and nutrition of children. Officials jealously guard what they see as their sovereign right to run things in their own country their own way, without foreigners telling them what to do and how to respond to the food crisis.
Baby Food
Resident humanitarian agencies the UN and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have found that the very high rate of malnutrition in children under two is caused partly by the lack of appropriate food aid for the weaning child those who needs to graduate to solid food through a diet of semi-solids. In any country or culture this is difficult, and time-consuming for mothers and carers who must find suitable food, spend time preparing it and attempt to feed the baby. In north Korea, the problems are enormous. Rice porridge is the traditional and familiar base for weaning food, yet rice is often not available.
Most children of weaning age used to attend nurseries although no one is quite sure if this is still the case. Nurseries, like the rest of the country, are struggling to cope with a lack of heating in winter temperatures regularly twenty degrees below zero centigrade, electricity shortages and scarce fuel. Workers have to be given time off to look for fuel and food for their families.
It is very difficult to use the unfamiliar commodities provided by international aid, like wheat or wheat flour or corn soya mix. They need extensive preparation and cooking to make them edible and fuel is scarce. Sugar makes such food palatable but it is often unobtainable. It is not, therefore, easy to persuade children to eat the donated food.
Unreachable
UN agencies and resident non-governmental organisations report healthier children in pre-school or schools than in the previous couple of years, but all are concerned about those non-attending who have no means of receiving UN food, which is distributed only through institutions. NGOs operating in the north of the country say there are obviously malnourished children in cities and urban areas who do not appear to be going to schools or any other institution.
Some of this is to do with the floods of the mid-1990s. Nurseries, kindergartens and schools were destroyed or severely damaged. Some children are too sick to attend school and others are away from home relatives cope with food shortages. Families in counties where food is not so scarce take care of youngsters from worse-off areas.
Less Care
Children up to seventeen in orphanages get priority for governmental and international aid. They are also a cause of concern, despite having had steady access to whatever food and health care the international community has provided.
The lack of weaning food in these institutions contributes to the risk of malnutrition for small children. For older ones, insufficient numbers of care staff pose a problem they are struggling to cope with a vast increase in numbers in residential care since the mid-1990s.
As with the entire population, the priority of care staff is to find food and basics for their own familiesı survival. This means regular time off work, leaving even fewer staff to deal with the multiple problems of deprivation where there is absolutely no familial support. The human and physical resources are pitiful compared to the scale of need. This reflects the very serious lack of basic supplies to almost the entire population.
Seeking Help
Regular time off work, combined with underemployment because of a lack of materials, fuel and other inputs to keep enterprises functioning, is illustrated by the very common sight of hundreds of women and men purposefully walking, bicycling and hitching rides from county to county seeking self-help solutions to questions of survival.
The formerly extensive state Public Distribution System can no longer guarantee food, fuel and basic supplies, and the government now seems to be permitting, of necessity, some relaxation in controls over internal movement.
Another unintended and much less desirable consequence of the food shortages is the shockingly rapid and extensive deforestation in the last five years. People are scavenging for firewood and any possible food source in the once extensive forests and woods.
The chronic food shortages and economic dislocation are a product of both the changed international economic and political landscape and the countryıs inability to reconfigure its politico-economic relationship to fit into the new global economy.
The abrupt end to cheap oil from the former Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the unavailability of modern technology, the isolation from capitalist markets and the absence of hard currency or capital, combined with a series of natural disasters in the mid-1990s, have all contributed to the tragedy of a nation where sixty-two percent of children are malnourished. Not one child has been unaffected by the lack of food, the absence of basic drugs like anaesthetics, antibiotics or tetanus vaccine and medical equipment and the deterioration of water and sanitation systems, contributing to compromised water supplies.
Bandaids
The government is responding with the second Chollima movementı a campaign named after a legendary Korean horse that could cover enormous distances in one stride. It is the second such campaign. The first helped rebuild the nation after the devastating Korean war of 1950-1953. The population is being mobilised now to rebuild damaged infrastructure like flood barriers, bridges and roads and to resuscitate production in mines and factories.
The difference today is that the Soviet Union is no longer around to support indigenous efforts through cheap oil, spare parts, technology and barter. The lack of external support, combined with the sheer physical exhaustion of a malnourished population, means that the country can only achieve the crudest bandaid solutions for its struggling economy.
Given that the leadership has no intention of changing its political or economic system to embrace capitalism, in the medium to long term, the main hope is that relations with its oldest adversaries the United States, the Republic of Korea and Japan improve to permit capital and technology transfer directly or indirectly through the international financial institutions.
Forget the Politics...
In the short term, the international community can and should do more to assist north Koreaıs hungry children. Rice should be donated specifically to feed those under two and for nursing mothers. This would encourage longer breast-feeding, which would in turn help protect against malnutrition in babies.
The argument is often made that rice is both expensive and easily divertible to less deserving members of Korean society, such as the military. There are four reasons why this is specious. Firstly, the scale of the international aid effort is such that funds could be found for appropriate food if the political will was there. Secondly, no international agency has ever found evidence of food aid diversion to the military. Thirdly, there would be nothing to prevent the humanitarian agencies negotiating specific protocols with the government to monitor the delivery of rice. Fourthly, the agencies could process the rice so that it was more suitable for feeding babies than adults thus minimising any likelihood of diversion.
More importantly, both the government and the United States need to rethink food priorities. If the north Korean leadership wants to ensure that future generations are not permanently damaged because of a lack of appropriate food at the crucial growth stage between birth and twenty-four months, it should ensure that all its young children have access to any available rice. Washington could also decide that, instead of prioritising the interests of American farmers and their consequent votes, it prioritises the interests of north Korean babies and their food. These babies need rice they are literally dying for it.
Dr Hazel Smith is Reader in International Relations at the University of Warwick. She most recently visited north Korea at the end of last year, and is a consultant on the country to UNICEF and the UN World Food Programme.