The Political Ecology of Famine: The North Korean Catastrophe and Its Lessons

Woo-Cumings, Meredith Working Paper The Political Ecology of Famine: The North Korean Catastrophe and Its Lessons ADBI Research Paper Series, No. 31 Provided in Cooperation with: Asian Development Bank Institute (ADBI), Tokyo Suggested Citation: Woo-Cumings, Meredith (2002) : The Political Ecology of Famine: The North Korean Catastrophe and Its Lessons, ADBI Research Paper Series, No. 31, Asian Development Bank Institute (ADBI), Tokyo, https://hdl.handle.net/11540/4137 This Version is available at: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/111123 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. 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If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/igo/ ADB INSTITUTE RESEARCH PAPER 31 The Political Ecology of  Famine: The North Korean Catastrophe and Its Lessons Meredith Woo-Cumings January 2002 ADB INSTITUTE TOKYO ASIAN DEVELOPMENT BANK INSTITUTE ASIAN DEVELOPMENT BANK INSTITUTE This paper critically examines the influential argument by Amartya Sen on the relationship between famine and political regime theory and exposes its limitations, particularly in the case of the Great Leap Famine. Using the little studied but tragic North Korea famine, the author explores its root causes in the context of food availability decline and complex ecological disruptions and interactions, including the El Nino Southern Oscillation in weather patterns. ADB Institute Research Paper Series No. 31 January 2002 The Political Ecology of Famine: The North Korean Catastrophe and Its Lessons Meredith Woo-Cumings II ADB INSTITUTE RESEARCH PAPER 31 Additional copies of the paper are available free from the Asian Development Bank Institute, 8t h Floor, Kasumigaseki Building, 3-2-5 Kasumigaseki, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 100-6008, Japan. Attention: Publications. Also online at www.adbi.org The Research Paper Series primarily disseminates selected work in progress to facilitate an exchange of ideas within the Institute's constituencies and the wider academic and policy communities. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions are the author's own and are not necessarily endorsed by the Asian D evelopment Bank Institute. They should not be attributed to the Asian Development Bank, its Boards, or any of its member countries. They are published under the responsibility of the Dean of the ADB Institute. The Institute does not guarantee the accuracy or reasonableness of the contents herein and accepts no responsibility whatsoever for any consequences of its use. The term "country", as used in the context of the ADB, refers to a member of the ADB and does not imply any view on the part of the Institute as to sovereignt y or independent status. Names of countries or economies mentioned in this series are chosen by the authors, in the exercise of their academic freedom, and the Institute is in no way responsible for such usage. Copyright © 2002 Asian Development Bank Institute. All rights reserved. Produced by ADBI Publishing. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Meredith Woo-Cumings is a Visiting Scholar at the Asian Development Bank Institute, on leave from the University of Michigan. Her teaching and research interests include East Asian politics, international political economy, and U.S.-East Asian relations. She has authored and edited five books, including Race to the Swift: State and Finance in Korean Industrialization (Columbia University Press, 1991), which was published under the name Jung-en Woo. Professor Woo-Cumings is currently finishing a manuscript, entitled Three Worlds of East Asian Capitalism, and expects to see her latest edited book, Neoliberalism and Reform in East Asia, in press shortly. She has receive d an M.A. in International Affairs (1982), and Latin American Studies (1984), and a Ph.D. in Politica l Science from Columbia University (1988). Previously she taught political science at Northwestern University, and before that at Colgate University and Columbia University. III PREFACE The ADB Institute aims to explore the most appropriate development paradigms for Asia composed of well-balanced combinations of the roles of markets, institutions, and governments in the post-crisis period. Under this broad research project on development paradigms, the ADB Institute Research Paper Series will contribute to disseminating works-in-progress as a building block of the project and will invite comments and questions. I trust that this series will provoke constructive discussions among policymakers as well as researchers about where Asian economies should go from the last crisis and recovery. The conference version of this paper was presented on 7 December 2001 at the ADB Institute’s Fourth Anniversary on “Poverty Reduction: Quality of Growth, Governance, and Social Development”. (www.adbi.org/povred/pov2001.htm) Masaru Yoshitomi Dean ADB Institute IV TABLE OF CONTENTS About the Author II Preface III Table of Contents IV 1. Introduction 1 2. Shifting the Focus of Public Policy Debate on Famine 1 3. The Specter of Modern Famine 4 4. Famine as Failure of Entitlement and Politics: Amartya Sen and His Arguments 5 5. Democracies Don’t Have Famines? 6 6. FAD (Food Availability Decline) and Ecology 7 7. Entitlement Protection or Development Strategies? 9 8. Moore and Sen: A Compelling Alternative 10 9. Democracy and Famine 12 10. Variation in Political Regimes, or Variations in Climate? 15 11. North Korea’s Great Leap Backward 21 12. The Food and Energy Crisis 23 13. Climate and Famine 28 14. Consequences of the North Korean Famine 30 15. Conclusion: “The light which they throw” 32 Bibliography 34 Notes 41 1 The Political Ecology of Famine: The North Korean Catastrophe and Its Lessons Meredith Woo-Cumings 1. Introduction Why famine? Famine is one of the oldest and most traumatic trials of humanity, but it isn’t going away anytime soon: our modern world may be awash in surplus foodstuffs, yet our new century is still punctuated by famine and fear of famine. If Lord John Russell, British Prime Minister at the time of the Irish Potato famine, remarked that this was “like a famine of the 13th century acting upon a population of the 19th”,1 today this 13th century tragedy visits itself upon the 21st century, in places like North Korea, Mongolia, and Afghanistan. We should be concerned because contemporary famines are integrally related to the wars, political regimes, climate changes and resulting policy debates that affect our daily lives and occupy our daily discourse, but we have no consensus on how to fight this ancient scourge, long signified by the fourth symbol of the black horse of the apocalypse—death itself. New scholarly interest in famines came in the 1980s, with an outpouring of research and a multidisciplinary debate on the famines of that era in the African Sahel, particularly in Ethiopia and Somalia. Much of this interest was stimulated by important new work on famine and political regime types by Amartya Sen, who won the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economics for his path-breaking work. But even more importantly, as I shall later discuss, the new attention came as a result of growing sensitivity to the precariousness of our planet and its ecology, to which the persistence of famine in the modern (or post-modern) age gives grim testimony. 2. Shifting the Focus of Public Policy Debate on Famine There is of course no single theory of famine, but the theory that has had more influence recently than any other is Amartya Sen’s, with his emphasis on political regime type: democracies not only do not fight each other, it turns out, but they also do not have famines. Sen’s work has been called the most comprehensive framework since Malthus for analyzing famine and deprivation,2 and it was a major departure from supply-side understandings (i.e. famine as the predictable result of there being too many people, too little food). Sen has effectively demonstrated that famine is rarely if ever about insufficient stocks of food; it is about the politics of food distribution. Sen’s theory developed within the context of his comparative analysis of famines and procedures for their relief in democratic India and totalitarian People’s Republic of China (PRC), and is part of his life-long advocacy of individual freedom and democracy as both a means toward and the proper goal of contemporary development. Development is not about the wealth of nations, he has argued in Development as Freedom, it is really about the substantive freedom that individuals enjoy. In other words, it is about the richness of life “in the sense of activity” that Aristotle examined in the Nicomachean Ethics.3 Sen’s orientation is echoed in the current development Zeitgeist, for example in the 2 “comprehensive development framework” which World Bank President James Wolfensohn describes as an “analytical framework that presents the structural, social and human aspects” of development.4 Human freedom and the development of all creative human capacities constitute an admirable and unassailable ethical program, one that I completely share. But how does this program fare as an empirical proposition, in relieving or ending famine? At the end of the day, I will argue that Sen’s work does not help us very much in understanding the vexing phenomenon of famine in our time. It is not just because his analysis favors democracies when so many famines occur in non-democracies (and therefore his political remedies are unavailing), or that it is market-based when famines so often occur in non-market societies, but because Sen’s arguments do not go far enough to address critical social and developmental issues that are raised by human catastrophes like famines. I will develop this critique below in successive cuts, or waves, deeper and deeper as it were, in the frame of mind that the best complement one can do for a fine scholar is to take his views seriously and see how well they explain our world. To anticipate my argument, I will propose the following four alternative ways of thinking about famine in our time. First, I don’t believe that there is a simple correlation between famine and political regime type—Sen’s celebrated idea that famines do not occur in democracies. But even if it were true, in practical policy terms this generalization does not get us very far in dealing with the pressing problem of famine that today threaten many weak nations around the world. Instead of focusing on political regime type (democratic or authoritarian), I will focus on political processes that immobilize attempts to alleviate problems of food shortage. I will make this argument in the context of disagreeing with another part of Amartya Sen’s theory— namely that famine is not a function of decline in food availability, so much as a shift in differential access to food. In socially hierarchical and differentiated societies like those in South Asia, famine is clearly and primarily a matter of access to food and famine can occur in the context of abundance of food, as it did in Bengal in the early 1940s. On the other hand, famines in communist PRC in the 1950s, or communist North Korea in the 1990s, occurred in the context of unanticipated food shortages amid relatively egalitarian distribution, regardless of the other abominable shortcomings and failures of these regimes. Food availability supply, which is in great part dependent on climatic variability, remains important, in my view, in understanding occurrence of famine. Second, I argue in this paper for the need to move away from the arrogance of our age, the modern Promethean conviction that we have defied and tamed the elements. Climatic change and aberrational weather may have much more to do with famine than regime type, especially in less sophisticated economies whose technology and economic resources are ill-equipped to deal with such aberrations. In the case of a relatively autarkic country like North Korea, this may be even more true; of course, I recognize that in making this argument I run the risk of absolving a creaking, obsolescent totalitarian system of its sins. My point, rather, would be that the sins of this system are five decades old, but its experience of famine, a mere five years—and these turn out to be years of remarkable climatic aberration. Rather than apologizing for North Korea’s cruel and increasingly hapless rulers, I am interested in the lessons this case may hold for other vulnerable economies of very different internal constitution—authoritarian, democratic, or somewhere in between. 3 Third, I will argue for the need to shift our focus away from Sen’s “entitlement protection” through guaranteed employment at subsistence wage and gratuitous relief for the unemployable, to a larger developmental imperative. This is really another way of saying that we must stop thinking in terms of disaster relief amid general agrarian torpor, and move toward creating the basis for sustained development. This imperative is absolutely fundamental when dealing with a society undergoing critical transitions as the result of famine. This brings me to the next point. Fourth, the literature in economics on famine, not excepting Amartya Sen’s work, does not help us in understanding the long-term consequences of catastrophes like famine. Famine is a historical marker like no other for the people who suffer it; in many societies famines serve as a common means of recording and recovering the experiences of the past, pivotal dates which act as the pole around which all other experiences and impressions are collected and organized. Famines have thus unleashed great social transformations: in PRC after the Great Leap Forward, famine paved the way to a period of de-collectivization in the early 1960s that anticipated in many ways the major de-collectivization after 1978. In North Korea, famine has transformed the country, for better or worse, into a “transitional economy,” where most vital economic activities are now taking place outside the “normal” planned economy, for the first time in that regime’s history. In both North Korea and PRC, famine seems to have forced changes that the leadership itself could not (or would not) envision. Thus, understanding the long-term impact of famine is critical for devising new strategies of development in these societies. My particular concern in the latter part of this paper is with the most widelypublicized famine in the 1990s, in North Korea. Occurring primarily in the years 1995 through 1998, this famine was truly biblical in scope, if estimates of casualties running as high as 2.5 million are accepted.5 If this excess mortality rate is credible, then the North Korean famine would be a catastrophe more severe, in proportional terms, than famines which befell PRC during the Great Leap Forward (claiming anywhere between 18 million to 30 million people), or India during its last major famine, the Great Bengal Famine of 1943, said to have claimed anywhere between 1.5 million deaths to double that figure.6 In spite of its ubiquity in the news media, the famine in North Korea has received very little serious analysis. We see the same images of starving children over and over in the media, but get little scholarship. The dearth of reliable data on this famine is one cause, but then famine data are notoriously unreliable in general. North Korea’s “Hermit Kingdom” autarky and closure to foreigners is another cause, of course, but even after international relief agencies were given greater access to North Korea than any other foreigners in the history of the country, this famine has eluded most scholarly scrutiny.7 What scrutiny exists, moreover, fails to examine the North Korean famine comparatively, especially in the light of previous famines in socialist countries. Nor is there any study that examines the current famine in the light of tried-and-true indigenous strategies of adaptation and coping in times of food shortage, something that had long been at the core of traditional statecraft in Korea. Of more contemporary concern is the process by which a developing country with comparatively high rates of industrialization and urbanization (North Korea’s economic achievement once led the economist Joan Robinson to exclaim that the North Korean economic miracle was greater than any in modern times8) has collapsed into famine and global mendicancy.9 Finally, I also want to 10 penury can be overcome—such that Tawney’s peasant finally gets his nose permanently above the water. Sen’s great example of PRC’s massive Great Leap famine places this problem of entitlement versus developmental reform in a kind of relief: after an agrarian revolution culminates by taking power and then enforcing violent land reform campaigns in the early 1950s, PRC’s leaders created a vast egalitarian mass of peasant cultivators, and made major gains in the average food consumption of its 400 million people. The extremes of the Great Leap Forward then led to a catastrophic famine that becomes Sen’s punctuation point, proving his theory about democracy and famine. Unquestionably the regime failed to respond in time to save the lives of millions of peasants, but when it did respond, it ultimately transformed the livelihoods of several hundred million peasants (modestly in the early 1960s, but permanently after Deng Xiaoping’s reforms subsequent to 1978.) So in the end which is the punctuation point? Did famine occur because of an absence of democracy, or did famine stimulate an undemocratic regime to turn its back on its own ideological verities and let market mechanisms begin to create agrarian wealth? It goes without saying that had PRC avoided the terrible famine of the early 1960s, its record of agrarian reform and placing a floor on agrarian poverty strongly contrasts with India’s perennial agrarian penury. But what if famine is itself a catalyst for dramatic regime reform, even in a totalitarian system? What would that do to Sen’s theory? We can examine this question better if we think historically about famine crises. Sen’s theory is thus an economic theory, and not a historical one; it has little to say about historical consequences of famine. But famines are historical markers; Cornelius Walford remarked that in Britain famine had given rise to “several of our more important and distinctive institutions.” Among these were the English Poor Law, and the Corn Laws (from their origins in the 13th century, restoration in 1663, down to their final repeal during the Irish potato famine.) The catastrophe of the Great Leap Forward led to a massive reversal of policy, so that the disaster would never again be repeated. In fact, PRC never again repeated the tragedy of the kind of famine that visited it forty years ago.37 Later on I will argue that social learning and transformation seemed to have occurred faster and more permanently in authoritarian PRC, and less in democratic India. I will also argue later that famine in North Korea has brought about a greater transformation in that society, thrusting it into an informal, transitional economy. In other words famine was an important historical turning point in PRC, as we saw above, and is likely to be so in North Korea. 8. Moore and Sen: A Compelling Alternative In thinking about the differences between South Asia and East Asia, it is still instructive to recall a great text in the literature on comparative politics: Barrington Moore’s Social Origins of Dictatorship and Development. In that seminal book Moore traced three modern paths of development: revolution from above, the fascist route to modernity; revolution from below, the peasant-communist route to modernity; and the slower, more evolutionary (but still revolutionary) trajectory of the capitalist and middle class revolution, symbolized by England’s history. At the most abstract level, East Asia experienced all three paths: PRC is Moore’s model of the peasant-revolution route to modernity, just as Japan (seen through a German glass darkly) is his example of 11 revolution from above. For a generation after 1945 North and south Korea embodied these two separate routes to modernity, but culminated in a capitalist democratic outcome in the Republic of Korea, similar to Japan. Viet Nam’s experience likewise detracts nothing from Moore’s analysis. If East Asia experienced these three paths to modernity, it is striking that South Asia experienced none—according to Moore. In India Moore found a weak impulse toward modernization, with “neither a capitalist revolution from above or below, nor a peasant one leading to communism;” yet he found it unquestionable that “a parliamentary regime has existed for some time that is considerably more than mere façade.”38 Apart from the signal importance of religion in shaping India’s history, Moore cites two other features of critical importance: (1) the widespread penury of agrarian cultivation, which he contrasts to the dynamic peasant agriculture in Japan and PRC’s capacity for feeding hundreds of millions of people; and (2) the apparent peasant docility of the Indian peasants, which may not contrast much with Japan, but does so mightily with PRC, Korea and Viet Nam.39 As he put the point in its fullness, Barring some technical miracle that will enable every Indian peasant to grow abundant food in a glass of water or a bowl of sand, labor will have to be applied much more effectively, technical advances introduced, and means found to get food to the dwellers in the cities. Either masked coercion on a massive scale, as in the capitalist model including even Japan, or more direct coercion approaching the socialist model will remain necessary. The tragic fact of the matter is that the poor bear the heaviest costs of modernization under both socialist and capitalist auspices. The only justification for imposing the costs is that they would become steadily worse off without it. As the situation stands, the dilemma is indeed a cruel one. It is possible to have the greatest sympathy for those responsible for facing it. To deny that it exists is, one the other hand, the acme of both intellectual and political irresponsibility.40 One could hardly find a view more systematically at odds with Sen’s, but this is not a question of simple comparisons of democratic India to totalitarian PRC or North Korea; instead Moore has a comprehensive view of modernity that totes up the costs of modernization alongside the costs of its absence, and a dark, complex view of history that leads him to examine the claims of contemporary democracies from a long, historical perspective—one that that does not relegate the German or Japanese path (up to 1945) to the shadows of aberrational development, but reminds us that totalitarianism is not a communist monopoly. Moore critically assays India’s fatal absence of development through much of its history, but also applauds the democratic moorings of post-independence India. Instead of fairy tales about presumed universal aspirations to democracy and its evil opponents, Moore remarks that “under close examinations no political system turns out to be edifying” 41; each system had its formative crises, like defeat in two world wars and fascism in between for Germany, or the horrendous experience of the civil war for the United States. 9. Democracy and Famine In the light of Moore’s analysis, to say that Northeast Asia was one of the only regions in the developing world that was able to eradicate agrarian poverty and hunger (North 12 Korea did so through the 1980s, if not in recent years of crisis), is to issue a profound challenge to Sen’s analysis of poverty, hunger and democracy in South Asia. At the same time, it is important to understand that Sen would not really disagree with Moore’s depiction of India’s failure to eradicate everyday deprivation. Consider Sen and Drèze’ discussion below: Comparing India’s death rate of 12 per thousand with China’s [sic] of 7 per thousand, and applying that difference to the Indian population of 781 million in 1986, we get an estimate of excess normal mortality in India of 3.9 million per year. This implies that every eight years or so more people die in India because of its higher regular death rate than died in China in the gigantic famine of 1958-61. India seems to manage to fill its cupboards with more skeletons every eight years than China put there in its years of shame.42 This passage is as honest as it is troubling; when taken in the general context of Sen’s work on famine, a crude reading might suggest that Sen has allowed an obsession with a one-time catastrophe that befell PRC nearly half century ago blind him to an everyday holocaust going on in India. But he and his collaborator clearly understand Moore’s telling point about everyday agrarian misery, and proceed to quantify it dramatically. So perhaps now we can move to a direct comparison on his terms (rather than Barrington Moore’s): regardless of what Japan or Korea (or Germany) may have experienced along their paths to modernity, does Indian democracy make a critical difference in overcoming famine, as compared to totalitarian PRC? Or to put the question in Sen’s exact terms, adversarial politics and an open press are important institutional arrangements for the prevention and relief of famine, but is the absence of those arrangements a sufficient cause of famine? Sen and his collaborator, Jean Drèze, clearly think so. In their 1995 book on India, containing a chapter on the negative lesson of PRC (based, of course, on PRC’s abominable record during the Great Leap Famine), they single out the PRC government’s immunity to public pressure as one of the causes of famine—particularly “informational failure,” combined with a “controlled press, which duped the public in suppressing information about the famine, but in the process deluded the government, as well.”43 PRC’s famine “raged for three years without it being even admitted in public … and without there being an adequate policy response.”44 But if PRC in the 1958-61 period is their main concern, their argument extends to “non-democratic regimes” more generally: the early 1930s famine in the Soviet Union, the Great Leap Famine in PRC, and the late 1990s famine in North Korea all fall into the same category of non-democratic famine.45 At the basis of such authoritarian politics, they assert, is the “alienation of the rulers from those ruled:” 13 The political economy of famine causation and prevention involves institutions and organizations, but it depends, in addition, on perceptions and understandings that accompany the exercise of power and authority. It depends particularly on the alienation of the rulers from those ruled. Even when the immediate causation of a famine is quite different from this, the social or political distance between the governors and the governed can play a crucial role in the non-prevention of the famine (emphasis added).46 Like the argument about authoritarian systems, Sen extends these ideas about democracy and famine well beyond just India. He sees Botswana, Zimbabwe, Cape Verde, and Kenya as positive examples of democratic systems capable of averting famine. By contrast, authoritarian Sudan and Ethiopia are presented as negative examples where famines raged even without significant decline in food production.47 But exactly what constitutes functioning multiparty democracy in the developing world, is not a small question; if India’s claim to being the world’s largest parliamentary system is true, Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe and Kenya’s recent travails of oneparty rule make their claims to democracy much more tenuous. Furthermore a careful study of war and famine in southwestern Sudan shows that the democracy and famine correlation does not hold; it was the “democratic” government of Sadiq el Mahdi that was most hard-hit by famine. Famine, David Keen argued, was not just a product of war in Sudan, but of long-standing conflicts over economic resources exacerbated by a particular pattern of uneven development that generated growing pressures on food production, a pattern of unequal access actively promoted by a number of powerful interests (democratic or no), who stood to gain from it.48 The perception that one developing country is democratic and another is not also affects aid regimes and decisions. Western governments soft-pedaled the problems discussed above in regard to the el Mahdi regime, in part because it was seen as “democratic.”49 Likewise Western aid donors often use famine aid as a foreign policy instrument, with the aim of overturning governments they do not like, as happened in Ethiopia in 1983-1985.50 It is much easier to do so if such governments are deemed undemocratic. In the case of famines in communist countries—namely the Soviet Union’s in the 1930s and PRC’s during the GLF—Sen’s idea of lumping the Soviet Union and PRC together flies in the face of the best scholarship on Chinese and Soviet political economy. Few would agree that the “distance” between the state and the peasants was as great in the PRC as it was in the USSR; furthermore Stalin’s malice aforethought—or calculated indifference—to the plight of peasants in the Ukraine has no counterpart in Mao Zedong’s reaction to PRC’s famine. The Soviet people suffered severe famines in 1932-33, affecting major grain-producing regions of country including the Ukraine, the North Caucasus, and other regions, resulting in at least 6 million excess deaths between 1932 and 1934 (or between 8.95 million and 16.4 million in the period 1929-36).51 The Soviet state’s relationship to the peasantry had a semblance of “internal colonialism,”52 but no one has argued that PRC peasants were similarly “colonized,” the result of PRC experiencing a peasant revolution in an overwhelmingly rural society, whereas the Bolshevik revolution moved from the cities to the countryside, in successive and increasingly violent “colonizations,” the last being likened by scholars like Moishe 14 Lewin to military campaigns of forced grain confiscation. It began as a growing crisis in state-peasant relations caused by peasant discontent with Stalin’s collectivization program, calling for unconditional fulfillment of delivery quotas to the state. These quotas constituted “an extraction program which the city imposed upon the village,” and its consequence was to thoroughly alienate the peasantry—and this experience goes a long way toward explaining stagnant agricultural production throughout the Stalin era. Stalin believed that the state and the peasantry were at war with each other, and in many ways, so did the peasantry.53 In PRC the problem was not so much extraction of grain but rural development, which in turn required attentiveness to incentives that would get peasants to cooperate. PRC grain procurement policy in the years before the Leap was moderate and made possible increased peasant consumption. So, instead of the Soviet situation of a war-like relationship between the state and peasantry, in PRC, excessive procurement was the result of competitive target-setting.54 The period between 1949-1958 is often called one of unity between the peasants and the state, and considerable prestige for the Communist Party—a prestige shattered in the aftermath of the Great Famine, unleashing a series of powerful consequences. But prior to the Great Leap the collectivization process was deliberate and sensible, drawing the peasants quickly into conformity with central plans. Vivienne Shue’s work on peasant PRC on the eve of the Great Leap Forward details a well-thought out program of rural development that incorporated active participation of local cadres.55 Sen and Drèze are right that during the GLF there was clearly a massive failure of information, primarily in the absence of good statistical and monitoring systems. Inaccurate claims of a bumper 1958 grain harvest, up 92 percent from 1957, led the planners to shift land from grain to economic crops like cotton, sugarcane, beets, and divert agricultural laborers to industries. The false figures also led the leadership, especially Zhou Enlai, to speed up grain exports to repay debts to the Soviet Union and to import capital goods, and led to fast adoption of the GLF’s famed commune mess halls. Fantastic claims about grain output even led the leadership to encourage “all you can eat” practices, as if the communist dream of plenty had finally arrived.56 Excessive grain procurement also resulted from politically-motivated exaggeration of harvest size and the destruction of objective reporting systems, which kept the leadership in the dark about the real supply conditions. But was there a conspiracy of silence—a communist press that “duped the public in suppressing information”? PRC reports at the time did mention the existence of malnutrition, “serious famine,” and even “starvation,” although it did not report the magnitude of loss of life.57 Furthermore in the context of extremely tense relations between PRC and the U.S., the Americans found profit in publicizing PRC’s food shortage problems (in 1960 especially), but the United States was not about provide food relief to PRC and so used the figures for propaganda, and of course PRC in turn was loath admit to “famine” before the international community.58 “Who defines an event as a ‘famine,” Alexander de Waal once wrote, “is a question of power relations within and between societies.”59 Contrary to what Sen writes, most PRC scholars agree that by the fall of 1958 Mao Zedong was aware of food shortage problems caused by excesses of the Great Leap; nor was 1958 a bad year in comparison to 1960, which was by far the worst year of the famine, with PRC losing net of ten million people.60 (When Mao was told in 1959 15 that peasants were hiding food, he replied: “I would be happy if peasants really have hidden grain. I am afraid they have nothing to hide!” 61). Mao initiated adjustments in early 1959, and supervised the implementation of the adjustment program—settling accounts within the commune, returning property and funds requisitioned from lower level agricultural collectives, and the like. The adjustment program was derailed during the summer of 1959, but not because of absence of information. Instead the popular Defense Minister Peng Duhai challenged Mao’s power: returning from the Soviet Union, he criticized the excesses of Great Leap Forward, leading Mao to launch a campaign against “right opportunism,” thus setting back efforts to control the damage in the countryside. The looming conflict with the Soviet Union had distracted Mao’s attention from the disaster, and it wasn’t until 1961 that Mao finally made a self-criticism at a key Party meeting, and supported the farreaching retrenchment from the Great Leap. The real parallel between the famines in PRC and the Soviet Union is not so much their political system or regime type but the circumstances that accompanied the breakdown of their normal functioning. In both cases, famines occurred in the context of sharp changes in routine procedure, and amid major political campaigns: the anti-rightist movement in 1957, the Great Leap Movement from 1958, and the anti-reactionary movement after the severance of relations with the USSR in 1960. These were the major political events that delayed the effective relief of famine—but they were not its causes.62 The scholarship on PRC suggests that the real problem was the dramatic oscillation back and forth between periods of radical reform and periods of consolidation or retrenchment, leading to a massive immobilization of the system in the face of the major catastrophe in 1960-61. A massive and systematic systemic policy failure occasioned this immobility, but also prepared the ground for a radical retrenchment that made sure no such catastrophe would strike PRC in the future. The retrenchment and reform of the early 1960s showed that the PRC government was capable of changing its course dramatically, not just for another radical campaign but in the interest of feeding the population and developing agricultural production— something that one would not expect within a totalitarian framework, according to Sen. This policy pattern seems to have been an idiosyncratic aspect of the PRC communist system in the first decade after it came to power in 1949; it doesn’t seem to have characterized regime agricultural policy and practice thereafter, nor did a similar pattern characterize other communist regimes. Furthermore the very existence of these radical oscillations followed by genuine regime learning, provides a stark contrast with the USSR—which never found a way out of massive agricultural failure, instead carrying forward the birthmarks of Stalin’s violent campaigns against the peasantry. The actual political process in PRC in 1958-62 remains opaque to scholarly inquiry, but history since that terrible time has shown that the regime was clearly more responsive than was the Soviet regime under Stalin, and clearly capable of learning from mistakes. 10. Variation in Political Regimes, or Variations in Climate? “Climate,” wrote the French historian Immanuel Le Roy Ladurie, “is a function of time. It varies; it is subject to fluctuation; it has a history.”63 Climate has a history of its own—every raindrop or snowflake records the trajectory of its life—but climate history also carries with it an extraordinary burden of human history. If we can only evaluate 16 PRC’s response to the Great Leap Famine in the fullness of decades of time, climate history often operates in the measure of centuries. Furthermore the difficulties of doing interdisciplinary inquiry in history, political science, agrarian sociology and developmental economics pale before the requirements of integrating human history with climate. Thus climate is left to the scientists and human history to us, the scholars, who fall to our tasks regardless of the stiff winds blowing outside our doors. Peasants are not so lucky. Yet the ecological vulnerability of Asian peasants is an old subject of inquiry, antiquated in its centrality to centuries of scholars; at one time imperial rulers and regime scribes were acutely aware of how their political fortunes fluctuated with the weather and the resulting harvest. R. H. Tawney observed that PRC’s attempt to control its environment by irrigation and flood control was the most venerable part of its agricultural policy.64 The failure of the state to provide basic sustenance for people was an immanent sign of its (imminent) demise; natural disasters portended waning political fortune.65 Now arrives an interesting puzzle in our inquiry: India—a part of monsoon Asia—did not (at any time before the present) share PRC’s intense concern about how the mandate of Heaven fluctuated with heaven’s relentless climatic imperatives. Paul Greenough, a historian of India, observed about a Chinese scholar’s work that “No Indianist, I believe, could make a similar assertion about the South Asian state at any time except the present—the fundamental political theme running through Chinese sustenance concerns is largely missing.”66 This may help to explain the conspicuous absence in Amartya Sen’s work on the significance of climatic factors—and perhaps his distrust of central state intervention in food crises. If Chinese emperors came and went with the fluctuations of the weather (or thought that they did), people today are far more skeptical about the political impact of climatic change and far more confident of our capacity to tame or to defy the elements. In that sense famine is usually seen as something separate from ecology, more “as a symptom than cause, a sign of a society’s inner weaknesses and not just a consequence of temporary climatic aberration.”67 In recent years, however, global ecological disasters that have adversely affected fragile economies have occasioned a renewed68 interest in climate and social history: these disasters would include the devastating droughts in sub-Saharan Africa in the 1970s and 1980s; the El Niño events of 1972-1973, when droughts occurred simultaneously around the globe, adversely affecting food production in the Soviet Union, PRC, India, Central America, Australia, Indonesia, Argentina, Brazil, West Africa, and Ethiopia; and of course the “Greenhouse effect,” the apparent heating up of the earth’s atmosphere due to increasing amounts of carbon dioxide and other trace gases produced by human activities—mainly global industrialization. The curiously named El Niño is ‘a little guy that just keeps getting bigger and bigger:’ the 1972-73 event was considered one of the largest in a century, but was subsequently reconstituted on a much larger scale in 1982 and again in 1997-1998. There is a long-discredited theory that alleges a link between temperate climate and the rise of modern society; however studies of how climate impacts poor and structurally simpler economies do not have to invoke some sort of invidious climatic determinism. Regional changes happen in the frequency, intensity, duration, and even location of extreme meteorological events. By breaking down climate into such key components as temperature, rainfall, range of variability, seasonality, and extreme 17 events, one can more easily identify ways that climate may affect society and ways that those societal effects can be mitigated or adapted to, if not prevented by human action.69 Such concerns are at the heart of many initiatives on sustainable development, with a pronounced emphasis on ecology.70 The Annales school, in pursuit of “total history,” developed through investigations of the longue duree, which included the historical significance of climatic change and the cycle of seasons and harvests; the point was to discover the consequences these had for agriculture, settlement and trade, the movement of food prices, population trends, and the periodicity and dissemination of epidemic disease—all matters having a bearing, directly or indirectly, on famine. But if it’s easy to begin examining climate change and society, where to end? The natural and human history of climate is necessarily an interdisciplinary effort that could involve the insights of experts in most if not all of the natural and social sciences—biologists, meteorologists, geographers, archaeologists, historians, dendrochronologists, phenologists, glaciologists, geologists, and even palynologists.71 The disciplinary boundaries of the social sciences appear to replicate their deleterious effects in the hard sciences: as a recent NASA report states, in spite of the recognition of myriad global connections among Earth’s components, “it is relatively recently that scientists in one discipline have had to confront the need for major contributions from other disciplines in order to achieve substantial advance.”72 In history and the social sciences one often finds this, in linking climate with human society: absolutely nothing. For example there is virtually no information on the impact of global climatic regime on North Korea;73 thus in the later part of this paper we can do little more than piece together information about global ecological change, and look for coincidental changes in rainfall variations in North Korea for the period 19952000. First, we need to say a few things about global climatic changes on society. Luckily there is an original and exemplary account of global climatic change and its political implications, one that has greatly influenced my thinking. This is Mike Davis’ Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (2001). Ostensibly Davis’ subject is the rise of what has come to be known as the “Third World,” which he traces to a terrible confluence of events between the world climate system and the global economy—what happened to people caught “between the teeth of—massive and implacable cogwheels of modern history:” In the first instance, there was the fatal meshing of extreme events between the world climate system and the late Victorian world economy. The 1870s … provided numerous examples of a new vicious cycle … linking weather and price perturbations through the medium of an international grain market. Suddenly the price of wheat in Liverpool and the rainfall in Madras were variables in the same vast equation of human survival.”74 Davis’s account of “global climate-meets-global economy” has a cruel implication for North Korea—a country that was hell-bent to maintain prophylactic barriers against the rest of the world may have been at the eye of the global ecological disaster, and ended up descending into a famine that was as unusual as it was unaccountable. We will examine that below, but Davis’s account begins at least a century earlier, in the teeth of a prolonged or “Victorian” drought, which created simultaneous famines 18 around the world—in India, Ceylon, north China, southern Java and Borneo, the Visayas, Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, Angola, South Africa, northeast Brazil—and, interestingly enough, Korea. If these peoples were in the grip of merciless drought, a biblical black horse trampling roughshod through each afflicted place, they could not (and did not) know that they were not alone. But Davis’ retrospective global eye is on the general condition that he believes explains the idiosyncratic local calamity: a phenomenon now known as ENSO—El Niño Southern Oscillation, as it were, the ‘Moby Dick behind the fourth horse of the apocalypse.’ ENSO is, in Davis’s words the “elusive great white whale of tropical meteorology for almost a century,” 75 and the crux of the ENSO theory is the recognition that giant oscillations of ocean temperature and air pressure in the equatorial Pacific directly affect normal rainfall patterns over much of the globe. ENSO is the great secular fluctuation, whereas “El Niño” is a weak counter-current that slightly raises sea temperatures off the coast of Ecuador and Peru every year near Christmas (thus El Niño, “the Christ child”).76 The ENSO is different: the active ocean component of a vast, Pacific Basin-wide oscillation in air mass and ocean temperature, most influential in its warm phase of ENSO (the cold phase is known as El Nina). The ENSO warm extreme appears to have close association with drought in much of the monsoon tropics and northern China. “ENSO,” writes Davis, is indeed the unlocked “secret of the monsoons” itself.77 Scientists have now exhaustively studied the ENSO phenomenon, especially in the aftermath of the ENSO-related disasters of 1997-1998 (of which more, below.) The World Meteorological Association, in conjunction with various agencies under the United Nations auspices, held a series of conferences, based on reports from various national governments that were affected by the catastrophe, and the information is readily available to the public.78 An alarming fact is that the El Niño cycle seems to have been accelerating in recent years, quite possibly as the result of the “greenhouse effect.”79 History only counted eight or nine “very strong” El Niños going back to 1728: an average of an ENSO every 42 years. In our time two of the three largest (1982-83, 1997-1998) have occurred within fourteen years of one another. Even stranger, the El Niño of 1990-95 wouldn’t go away; it is said to be the longest in the historical and paleo-climatic records. This leads some to argue that its very uniqueness in the very long run of previous centuries must mean that it is the residue of human behavior: of anthropogenic global warming.80 To the extent that the meteorologists are correct, some apocalypses attributed to individual human failing—like Mao’s Great Leap Forward turning to a world’s worst famine—look more like a consequence either of a cruel atmosphere, or general human folly (sending all those hydrocarbons through smokestacks the past two hundred years). The “strong” El Niño of 1957-1959 produced nearly a million refugees in the Brazilian sertao, and caused droughts in PRC; why not at least some room for it bringing Mao’s schemes to ruin, too? Yet the rejection of climatic factors is so routine that Dali Yang, author of the most thoughtful and carefully-researched account of the Great Leap Famine, does not see fit to dwell on the weather. Instead, Yang examines party membership or the density of commune mess halls in famine-struck areas, to understand the determinants of famine-related deaths. Chinese meteorologists have long sought to understand a drought in the GLF period that affected one-third of the nation’s cultivated acreage—which they see as the 19 most extreme of the twentieth century. “For the first time in human memory, people could actually wade across the Yellow River.” From its peak of 200 million tons in 1958, grain production dropped by 15 percent in 1959, and declined by another 15 percent in 1960 before flattening out in 1961. The average proportion of the sown area hit by natural disasters in 1959-1961 was more than double that in 1949-66 (minus 1959-1961).81 In one of the finest works to date on Chinese agriculture, Y. Y. Kueh uses impressive statistical modeling for the years between 1931-1991 to argue that the enormous grain losses during 1959-1961 were caused primarily by large-scale weather anomalies, which fluctuated far more wildly than all the other episodes of disturbances in the period under his study. He also finds that the grain yield and output losses in 1960-1961, combined with sown-area losses in 1959, were much greater than those of other periods of major agricultural instability (for example during 1931-37 and 197084).82 Kueh also argues that outputs and yields of rice and wheat crops per sown hectare were biased consistently downward in 1960 and 1961, whereas in other periods of climate fluctuation, rice and wheat yields varied inversely with climate trend lines. Thus in previous episodes of large-scale climate disturbance, good harvests in other regions (or alternative crop seasons) could serve partially to offset the losses incurred. No such compensatory adjustments characterized the 1959-61 period. To return to our earlier analysis, food availability decline (FAD) seems to have been an important factor in creating the world’s biggest famine disaster. The scientists say it was weatherinduced and the political scientists say it was ideologyand Communist Party-induced. Can we solve this puzzle? As a collective catastrophe, famine often leads to a complete breakdown of the customary patterns of work, and customary norms of morality and social behavior. Yet, as Arnold notes: “However unexpected, however devastating the crisis, a society will not act entirely out of character during a famine.” (italics mine.)83 Martin Ravallion, the pre-eminent economist of famine, put it differently—famine is a tragic magnification of normal market and government failures; to understand famine one must understand how normal institutions work under stresses they do not normally encounter.84 These insights may allow us to square the circle: the Great Leap Famine was indeed a huge magnification of policy failure, in the context of a socialist economic revolution; but it was made far worse by the ENSO impact. A great deal of further inquiry will be needed to determine how to apportion responsibility—to Mao, to ENSO, and to the “normal” breakdowns of any society faced with famine. If Mao’s China was not just any society, its character in Arnold’s sense is, for Amartya Sen, an “authoritarian polity” in which an ideological tyrant wields unchecked power, even against common sense. It is this fundamental absence of accountability that causes the famine. But if PRC is also remembered as a developmental society (“catch up with England in 15 years” was one ubiquitous slogan of the GLF), and the Great Leap Famine as a classic—if gargantuan—developmental failure, we may not resolve the dispute with Sen’s characterization, but we can begin to understand why and how the leadership eventually rectified its problems through another set of centrally-directed developmental plans (equally unchecked by democratic accountability), done for the purposes of reform and retrenchment, which led to subsequent agricultural development and no repeat of massive famine. 26 year before 1990. Thus, agriculture currently operates at 20 to 30 percent of normal levels of soil nutrient inputs. This shortfall is said to be the largest single contributor to reduced crop yields and to food shortage.119 The North Koreans were also curiously reliant on tractors, an oddity in a country that is land-scarce.120 But tractors held a special place in the North Korean heart as a symbol of socialist agriculture and self-reliance; they produced their own brand of tractor by 1958. In the mid-1970s, there were said to be four tractors in use per 100 hectares. The North Korean agricultural requirement for tractors is said to be 140,000 tons of petroleum products, mostly diesel. In 1990 North Korean diesel consumption stood at 120,000 tons, and it now stands at 25,000 to 35,000 tons per year, leading to 70 to 80 percent reduction in the use of tractors and other farm machinery.121 So, what accounts for such excessive use of industrial inputs? One answer has to be the historic significance of the chemical industry, going back to Japan’s huge Nissan Chisso plant installed in the late 1930s;122 also the availability of fertilizers and oil imports on concessional terms from the Soviet bloc, allowing the North Koreans to increase levels of application at marginal costs lower than that for other East Asian economies. The other answer has to be the importance of food self-sufficiency as a political goal, so much so that economic inefficiency and cost probably did not matter quite as much.123 North Koreans did try to reduce the rural sector’s dependence on its precarious energy regime. To save electricity, for instance, they converted the Hungnam Chemical Fertilizer Complex to use the unconventional technology of gasifying anthracite, an abundant resource in North Korea, thus to produce ammonia. This saved electricity by three-quarters—but there was a catch: the process of anthracite gasification is a clumsy technology, it frequently led to breakdowns, and the factories sat idle for long periods of time for want of repair parts.124 On the other hand, the important nitrogen fertilizer plant in Hamhung—the colonial legacy of Jun Noguchi, which in the years before World War II was the second largest fertilizer plant in the world—has remained inoperable at least since 1994, with the DPRK government appealing to the world to refurbish the plant.125 The energy crisis in the 1990s stemmed in part from the collapse of trade with the Soviet Union, its main trading partner. The trade with the Soviet Union not only accounted for the stunning three-fifth of North Korea’s total trade in 1988, but it was on a concessionary basis. Soviet coal and oil exports to North Korea, for instance, went at substantially less than world market price. Using the “mirror statistics” issued by the Russian State Statistical Committee, Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute and others calculate these energy subsidies to be an additional $400 million between 1980-1990, in addition to the $4 billion North Korean trade deficit in the 19851990 period that Moscow was willing to finance.126 Then trade flows abruptly collapsed in 1991, with the advent of hard currency terms of payment for Soviet products and services; in 1993, even the PRC would demand payment at the standard international price and in hard currency rather than through barter trade. In 1991 imports from the USSR dropped to under $600 million, equivalent of two-fifth of North Korea’s total import level in 1987 and 1988. By 1993, Russian exports to North Korea were less than a tenth of the 1987-1990 level.127 Such trade collapse was made all the more catastrophic by the fact that the North Korean industrial base was largely constructed with Soviet material and technical assistance, and thus difficult to substitute. 27 The collapse of trade with the Soviet Union did not lead to a surge in trade with the PRC, however—a standard North Korean tactic back in the days of the “Sino-Soviet split.” The North Korean reaction, in the immediate aftermath of the trade collapse, was to slash its exports to PRC, thus to conserve resources to domestic use, leading to further contraction of trade. In the event, the PRC did emerge as a principal exporter of food and energy to North Korea, although the PRC demand in 1993 for hard currency payment seems to have affected its food exports to North Korea, to a drop of almost two thirds, and energy exports by over a quarter.128 The timing of this precipitous decline in food and energy exports could not have been worse; when combined with Beijing’s recognition of Seoul in 1992, it led to a long-term freeze on high-level Sino-North Korean contacts. Once the famine was in full fury in 1995, however, the Chinese reversed their stance, and began to provide North Korea with energy and food at old “friendship” prices.129 A key problem with electricity supply for North Korean irrigation is not the total amount over the course of a year—which is said to have a shortfall of 1.0 billion kWh— but the peak power required during the irrigation season in May. The 1998 UN expert mission put it like this: The unreliable water supply is mainly due to unreliable pumping, which is mainly caused by an unreliable electricity supply… Examinations of records at three major pumping stations indicated that they had suffered an average of nearly 600 power failures per year, over 2300 hours per year with no power, an average voltage reduction of over 15 percent … and a 10 percent average frequency reduction … The frequent power failures result in considerable waste of water … the short-fall in water available to the crops is estimated to be about a quarter of the total requirement.130 This appears to be just one more way in which a cascading “domino effect” led to the implosion of what had been a highly successful agrarian program, at least by socialist standards. Perhaps this multitude of pyramiding calamities further immobilized a leadership left in chaos by the sudden disappearance of its “Great Leader.” All in all, we seem to have a neat explanation for how abrupt external pressure from a capricious climatic environment in the mid-1990s, tended to press upon one nodal point after another in a complex industrial-agricultural system. That is, until we examine capricious fluctuations in that same external climate. 13. Climate and Famine “On the sticky summer day of June 26, 1995,” wrote Don Oberdorfer, long the Japan/Korea correspondent for The Washington Post, “the skies over [North Korea] darkened. Rains began to pound the earth, rains that were heavy, steady, and unrelenting and that soon turned into a deluge of biblical proportions.”131 The DPRK Bureau of Hydro Meteorological Service recorded 23 inches of rain in ten days, and in some areas as much as 18 inches of rain fell in a single day, bringing floods that were considered “the worst in a century.”132 When the rain stopped in mid-August the North Korean government announced that 5.4 million people were displaced, 330,000 hectares of agricultural land destroyed, 1.9 million tons of grains lost, and put the total cost of the flood damage at $15 billion.133 28 Outside observers were skeptical of the North Korean claims, likely little more than an excuse to cover up for the dismal failure of the economy and a ruse to obtain large famine relief from the United Nations. The Australian researchers, Heather Smith and Yiping Huang, believe that just as the PRC used climate as the main excuse for the Great Leap Famine, the North Koreans, too, were using climate as an excuse.134 Did food production drop precipitously in 1995-1997 when the climate was most unfavorable? The FAO data seem to indicate so, from a whopping 8 million tons in 1990 to 2.5 million tons in 1996. The Smith/Huang data that deflates the FAO series with other data show that between 1995 and 1997 grain output fell to half of the 1988 level.135 Yet because grain output did not improve in 1998-1999 when weather conditions improved, Smith and Huang discredit climate as a significant factor in precipitating the famine. When you combine an unforgiving and highly variant climate with existing environmental degradation, however, the lack of agricultural recovery in 1998-1999 does not appear to be a mystery. The North Korean version of Khrushchev’s “virgin land scheme,” bringing more marginal lands into production could have led to deforestation and increased rapidity of run-off, soil erosion, riverbed silting, and to flooding. The energy crisis also led people to forage wood for biomass—wood, fiber, and crop wastes—for household cooking and heating, further imposing burden on competing uses, like animal fodder and compost, affecting food supply. The overuse of ammonium sulfate as nitrogen fertilizer has acidified the soil and caused reduction in yields. In other words, it would be unrealistic to expect a quick recovery in 1998-1999. In any event, the floods in 1995 and 1996 proved to be only the beginning. Epic floods were followed by the “worst drought in decades,” according to the FAO/WFP Mission Report of July 1997, and after relative stability in 1998 and 1999, in 2000 drought struck again. This drought of 2000 also affected PRC, a number of other countries in central and south Asia, and the Middle East, but the impact was greatest on North Korea since it can produce food in only one season, June to October. FAO/WFP representatives reported empty reservoirs, with the overall water situation extremely poor. Following on the heels of this drought North Korea had the “coldest winter” in decades; the DPRK was again hit by a prolonged severe drought in the spring of 2001, ravaging winter/spring wheat, barley and potato crops. Spring rain had virtually failed between March to mid-June 2001, with drought lasting more than 100 days in many places, “reportedly the largest spring drought in recorded history.” This led to acute loss of soil moisture, depletion of reservoirs and crippling of irrigation systems, according to another FAO/WFP Mission Report, in July 2001. To make a long story short, North Korea seems to have been at the center of a global ecological disaster—it was profoundly affected by the ENSO of 1997-1998, said to be one of the worst in recorded history going back some three hundred years. The information on this 1997-1998 El Niño is abundant, given how environmental issues have quickly worked themselves to the top of the UN agenda, and also within the framework of the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction (IDNDR). Nowhere, however, is North Korea mentioned in connection to El Niño—the same country suffering one of the most publicized famines in recent history. It is not clear what might have caused the floods of 1995 and 1996, since those were not El Niño years—i.e., there was no major warming in the tropical eastern Pacific. K.-M. 29 Lau of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center thinks that the floods may therefore be due to internal atmospheric dynamics—by chance, and hence unpredictable—or some other factors. In the extratropics, natural calamities tend to occur more chaotically, and hence are less predictable.136 Another possibility is that the 1995-6 floods were episodic events interrupting a long-term drying trend in northern PRC and North Korea from the 1950s to the present. These may or may not be linked to El Niño, because North Korea is located at much higher latitudes (38 degrees North to 45 N), far away from the main effects of El Niño whose influence is mostly tropical and subtropical. Rather they may be related to global warming, and a natural phenomenon called the “Arctic Oscillations,” which affects polar regions, including Eurasia and the North Pacific Ocean.137 It will require much more work on this recent period by meteorologists before weather anomalies of the mid-1990s can be sorted out. On the other hand, the droughts of 1997 were clearly related to El Niño. Because the regions of northern PRC, northern Korea and northern Japan tend to be under similar climatic “forcing,” we can assess the North Korean situation by extrapolating from studies of these other regions. K.-M. Lau and Hengyi Weng, both at NASA, have studied the impacts of the 1997-1998 El Niño on major drought and flood occurrences over PRC, and concluded that “severe drought in northern China, and to a lesser degree the flood in southern China, in 1997 is likely a result of the influence of anomalous SST (sea surface temperature) forcing during the growing phase of the 1997-1998 El Niño.” Furthermore they report that on the average over all PRC, approximately 53% and 49% of the rainfall variance in 1997 and 1998, respectively, can be attributed to SST anomalies associated with El Niño. These are two of the largest anomalies in the past 44 years, in terms of the percentage of explained rainfall variance by global scale SST.138 The 1997-1998 El Niño had a long reach, stretching from Syria to Mongolia to PRC and North Korea, and also to Southeast Asia, devastating several developing economies that were mostly hapless against the most unusual climatic abnormalities. A particularly severe winter in Tibet wiped out an estimated 20 percent of all livestock.139 In Mongolia it produced a summer drought that left the animals unable to fatten for winter, and eventually killed some 3 million livestock.140 In Indonesia, an extended El Niño-associated drought aided the devastating fire that ripped through its tinder-dry forests, causing an estimated forest damage of 17,600 square miles. In Tajikistan, famine threatened its six million people, in what was deemed to be the worst drought in a half-century.141 30 14. Consequences of the North Korean Famine The famine also forced North Korea to become, for better or worse, a transitional economy. Bradley Babson of the World Bank even refers to its “informal economy,” noting the retreat of the state from the everyday provision of the necessities of its people.142 The social system that used to be able to provide income guarantees, education, medical security, low infant mortality rates, longevity, and social welfare service to the entire population (and since the urban population is more than 60 percent, this is a very large fiscal burden for the state), has now thrown its hands up, unable to cope. Thus North Korea is in a transition that it neither wished for nor planned. There now exist relatively free markets—the informal economy—all over the country—for agricultural commodities and daily needs, but with an increasingly broad range of goods being bought and sold (more often, bartered). After 1995 central authorities basically broke the social contract with the people, reducing grain rations for farm families from 167 kilograms per person per year to 107 kilograms; this in turn reduced the incentives of farmers to turn over food to the state, for urban and industrial workers. In 1996 the central government made an important decision to decentralize authority for feeding the population from national and provincial bureaucracies to county administrations. Finally in January 1998, a decision announced that each individual family was henceforth responsible for feeding itself, rather than relying on the Public Distribution System (PDS). In reality, the PDS was simply not functioning, as the number of people relying on PDS went from 61 percent in 1994 to 6 percent in 1997.143 The Government-run PDS is a system through which 13.5 million people—or around 60 percent—received subsidized food rations, and has been the primary mechanism for the distribution of food in North Korea. It is not a social service system, but rather a method of worker compensation. Main groups outside of the PDS are workers on state farms, who receive only six months’ rations through the PDS, and workers on cooperative farms who must depend on on-site production. The latter group has borne the brunt of the losses due to flooding, and has been the main recipient of humanitarian assistance. Predictably, farmers have resorted to diverting food in secret pre-harvestings. According to the fall 1996 WFP/FAO agricultural assessment, in the autumn of 1996 half the corn harvest—nearly 1.3 million metric tons—was missing, leading central authorities to dispatch soldiers to protect the fields. But this was not quite effective due to bribes to the soldiers, and given the breakdown as well in the military distribution system, leading the soldiers (the ranks of the armed forces include more than one million people) to join farmers in diversion.144 Farmers are also focusing on cultivating their private plots of land to grow vegetables, and on secret plots in the mountains outside the control of the collective agricultural system. These secret plots, called fire fields (hwajon), are very steep, however, and often infertile. With the farmers concentrating more on their private plots, some UN aid workers have noted that the soldiers seem to have replaced the farmers in planting and harvesting in collective farms. The most significant element of the informal economy are the “farmer’s markets,” of which there are said to be over three hundred all over North Korea, providing some 70-80 percent of food and other daily necessities to local and urban populations. The UN and NGO workers have also noted recent phenomenal increases in the frequency, selection of 31 products, and size of these markets. This resembles the famine situation in market economies analyzed by economists like Martin Ravallion and Amartya Sen. Price distortions have also fostered this informal economy; the official exchange rate is 2.2 North Korean won to the dollars, and the black market rate is 200. (The typical monthly wage for a North Korean worker is 200 won; the monthly cost of feeding a rural family of four is 4,000 won, and a typical urban-family consumer basket costs about 10,000 won.) With distortions this large, there are great incentives for the leakage of state-produced goods from the state distribution system into the informal markets, asset stripped and other forms of stealing from state enterprises, and selling of surplus production by farmers to the markets rather than to the state.145 Informal cross-border trade with PRC has also intensified. Although little is known about informal trade across the Russian border, it has probably grown rapidly as well. Foreign aid has also fed the rise of the informal economy, as corrupt officials diverted food aid from the aid program. It has also helped stabilize and reduce the price of food in the farmer’s market, in some cases reducing the price of food by 25-35 percent between March and September 1998. Prices in this new economy in North Korea are set by the market and not the state, which could be very significant. If the urban population—that is, more than 60 per cent of the total population—are relying on the new economy for 70 percent of their daily needs, this is a very significant transition taking place. It is interesting to note, in this regard, that even during Perestroika the size of informal markets was not as large in the USSR, in relative terms, as North Korea’s, and the one thing that the state resisted most was the setting of prices by markets.146 In short, the state in North Korea has no choice but accept the expansion of farmers markets throughout the country, as an unofficially recognized mechanism to satisfy basic needs of the people, not met through the PDS. But it would be incorrect to think that the leadership considers the informal economy would be a permanent solution to North Korea’s many profound problems. Rather, when it deigns to acknowledge these changes at all in official publications, it describes them as temporary, emergency measures, while the state seeks significant expansion in international relations to get more aid and help, and to reconstruct the social welfare system. Does the rise of this informal economy portend a larger political change? It is hard to tell. Some observers have been quick to note the significance during the famine years of a devolution of economic authority from the central government to provincial and local authorities, and the delegation of economic authorities from local authorities to newly established trading interests in cities across borders with PRC. The argument is that if in North Korea “grain is power,” then central government must be relinquishing power, now that grain does not always flow from the center.147 But a different conclusion is also possible: the informal economy, rather than being the downfall of the central authority, may be serving to maintain the status quo and to shelter the regime from making reforms that would permit a new dynamic development. The easiest thing to be said about the ultimate consequences of this famine for North Korean reform is also the truest: it is too early to tell. Things inside North Korea have changed dramatically since 1995, as has the country’s relationship to the world. The new and widespread informal markets would be an excellent basis upon which a reformist leadership could build momentum for dramatic changes in the orientation and productivity of the economy, in both agriculture and industry. But at this writing, no 32 one can say that the leadership has come close to the dramatic breakthrough toward real reform that marked PRC’s new departures in 1978. If this happens, it will make my comparison with PRC’s developmental trajectory—outward from famine to a real solution to the food problem (and many others)—look rather good. That would be small recompense for me, but a huge gain for a population that has suffered terribly under the multiple afflictions of a remarkable structural conjuncture of outmoded social system, capricious climate, and stupefying leadership immobility. 15. Conclusion: “The light which they throw” In this paper I have not sought to develop another generic theory of famine to replace Amartya Sen’s, but to point out the limits of his theory in explaining the complex interaction of calamities—both natural and manmade—that delineate the parameters within which a full explanation of political regime response to famine might be possible. Sen’s approach is really about the symptoms and etiology of famine in a relatively stagnant agrarian economy, presided over by an imperfect democratic system that nonetheless has become adept at reading the signals of approaching famine and responding to them. In this paper we have examined his major negative example (PRC’s GLF) and one he could not have known about but which is nonetheless PRC’s regimetype brother: North Korea. Yet these cases seem to provide stark counterpoints for Sen’s analysis; these two totalitarian systems experienced stunning famines at different times and different places, with different outcomes (so far), but we have not been able to lay the blame for these famines solely—or even mostly—on the authoritarian rigidities of the systems themselves. Sen was admirably comparative, examining India and PRC in the light of each experience, but in the cases of India, Maoist PRC and North Korea, we found dramatic differences in the structural, social and human aspects of development, the politics of food distribution, and even in Sen’s richness of life “in the sense of activity.” On his most important point of comparison, we simply did not find strong evidence for any one-to-one relationship between famine and political regime type. Close examination of our planet and its ecology, however, may be the strongest challenge to any simple theory about why famine happened in these two communist countries. The historian of food crises in antiquity, Peter Garnsey, denied the possibility of a theory of famine: they are individual events; when the black horse rides in it may always be a horse of a single color, but each horse brings a scourge that varies as much as extreme weather: “Weathermen call hurricanes ‘Alice’, ‘Bertie’, “Charlie”, or whatever, always using a different name, implicitly acknowledging that each hurricane has its own particular identity. Each food crisis, similarly, was an individual event.”148 But I would not deny the possibility of a good theory of famine; I just know that such a theory must account for the short and long term fluctuations in water and wind, sun and darkness, geographical placement on a changing planet, and historical change in the constitution of human societies. Famine is an enormously complex social and biological phenomenon, as much so as war. We have many theories of war; they tumble out of the publishing houses every day. None are fully satisfying. There is, however, one elegantly parsimonious theory of war: democracies don’t fight each other. Sen has a similarly elegant theory: democracies don’t have famines. If we grant him that he is right (readers of this paper 33 need not be told that I disagree), there would still be the question of what to do about it. When the masons of the new order “stumble to their tasks,” in Tawney’s wonderful metaphor, where do they start in building democracy in North Korea, PRC, or Mongolia, or Afghanistan, thus to prevent yet more scourges of famine? If Sen’s arguments are not satisfying in distinguishing different famines, his remedies also do not go far enough to address critical social and developmental issues. The persistence of famine in our time really suggests a new, larger, and better grounded developmental imperative for this new century. Thus far, the literature in the economics of famine, including Amartya Sen’s work, does not give us the grounding we need to help us in understanding the long-term consequences of catastrophes like famine. Food availability supply, which is in great part dependent on climatic variability, remains important. A good historical and comparative understanding of how nature’s calamities manifest themselves differently in different social formations can help us distinguish periodic agrarian holocausts from the humdrum daily catastrophes that still afflict as much as two-thirds of the world’s population—or as Tawney put it, “The loss of life caused by the major disasters [may turn out to be] less significant than the light which they throw on the [appalling] conditions prevailing even in normal times” (p.5 above). We need to revise our thinking about famine, which will help to develop new policy mechanisms for dealing with its deadly effects. Then we can seek out reforms and developmental programs that might hope to eliminate both kinds of agrarian misery. We also, as I said earlier, need to interrogate the remaining great arrogance of our age, the modern conviction that we have defied and tamed the elements. If we cannot control our global climate, we can try to understand its movements, and avoid or contain their worst effects. Certainly this is the preeminent place where we need to “think globally but act locally.” The famine in isolated North Korea was part and parcel of a global ecological disaster, happening with greater frequency as the result of the global warming. A North Korea never wanting to join the world—or only to do so on its own terms—and which went to an extraordinary length to remain as autarkic as possible, ended up being nearly wiped out in a global ecological disaster. A capricious climate, then, became a sad reminder that North Korea lives in the same world climate regime that we all do. North Korea probably occasions less sympathy around the world than any other developing country, but its withdrawal from the world was for development, it was in search of wealth and power for the country. It did not simply stagnate like Myanmar or Albania, something that makes this little known case all the more interesting. The sins of its system, we noted, began more than half a century ago. But its experience of famine has been a mere five years, and these turn out to be years of climatic catastrophe. North Korea reaped the whirlwind in recent years, and its experience really points to the need for the development community to begin paying a whole lot more attention to climatic issues, and to assist developing countries to predict and cope with climatic aberrations. So I want to underscore the urgency on the part of the institutions like the Asian Development Bank to work more closely with poor societies to better predict, manage and cope with global climatic calamities. 34 Bibliography Anand, Sudhir, and Amartya K. Sen. 1994. Sustainable Human Development: Concepts and Priorities. United Nations Development Programme. Occasional Papers. http://www.undp.org/hdro/oc8a.htm (19 November 2001). Anh, Nguyen The. 1998. “Japanese Food Policies and the 1945 Great Famine in Vietnam.” In Paul H. Kratoska (ed.), Food supplies and the Japanese Occupation in South-East Asia. London: Macmillan Press Ltd. Arnold, David. 1988. Famine: Social Crisis and Historical Change. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Ashton, Basil, Kenneth Hill, Alan Piazza and Robin Zeitz. 1984. “Famine in China, 1958-61.” Population and Development Review 10(4): 613-45, (December). 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Devereux, Stephen. 1993. Theories of Famine. Hemel Hemstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Ding, Yihui. 1994. Monsoons over China. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Drèze, Jean. 1999. “Introduction.” In Jean Drèze (ed.), The Economics of Famine. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing. Drèze, Jean, and Amartya Sen. 1989. Hunger and Public Action. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Drèze, Jean, and Amartya Sen. 1995. India: Economic Development and Social Opportunuty. Dehli: Oxford University Press. Ea, Meng Try. 1984. “War and Famine: The Example of Kampuchea.” In Bruce Currey and Graeme Hugo (eds.), Famine As a Geographical Phenomenon. Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel Publishing Co. Eberstadt, Nicholas. 1996. “Starved for Ideas: Misconceptions That Hinder the Battle against World Hunger.” http://www.aei.org/oti/oti7164.htm (19 November 2001). Eberstadt, Nicholas. 1999. The End of North Korea. Washington, DC: AEI Press. Eberstadt, Nicholas, Marc Rubin, and Albina Tretyakova. 1995. “The Collapse of Soviet and Russian Trade with the DPRK, 1989-1993: Impact and Implications.” The Korean Journal of National Unification, 4: 87-104. Eberstadt, Nicholas. 1995. “China’s Trade with the DPRK, 1990-1994.” Korea and World Affairs. 19(4): 665-685, (Winter). Eckstein, Alexander. 1977. China’s Economic Revolution. New York: Cambridge University Press. FAO/WFP. 2001. Crop and Food Supply Assessment Mission to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. (October 26). http://www.fao.org/WAICENT/faoinfo/economic/giews/english/alertes/2001/SR DRK901.htm (19 November 2001). Garnsey, Peter. 1998. Cities, Peasants and Food in Classical Antiquity: Essays in Social and Economic History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Garnsey, Peter. 1988. Famine and Food Supply in the Graeco-Roman World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 42 Bernstein (1984); Eckstein (1977); Lieberthal (1997); Lin (1990); MacFarquar (1983); Peng (1987); Riskin (1987); Yang (1996); Yao (1999). 12 Arnold (1988:3-5) 13 Garnsey (1988: ix) 14 Drèze and Sen (1998:7) 15 Tawney (1932: 77) 16 Drèze and Sen (1998: 7-8) 17 Sen (1981: 45). Elsewhere Sen defines his approach thus:“ In each social structure, given the prevailing legal, political, and economic arrangements, a person can establish command over some alternative commodity bundles… The set of alternative bundles of commodities over which a person can establish such command will be referred to as this person’s ‘entitlements’.” (Drèze & Sen 1998: 9) This concept of entitlement focuses on a person’s legal, as well as social, rights of ownership. The categories of entitlement are: 1. Trade-based entitlement, which describes ownership transfer through commodity exchanges 2. Production-based entitlement, which describes the right to own what one produced with one’s own (or hired) resources 3. Own-labor entitlement, which incorporates all trade-based and production-based entitlements derived from the ‘sale’ of one’s own labor power 4. Inheritance and transfer entitlement, which refers to the right to own what is willingly given by others, including gifts and bequests, as well as transfers by the state such as social security or pensions (Sen 1981:2) 18 Devereux (1993:82). Alex de Waal (1990) has argued that Sen’s work does not include or deal with coping strategies of famine-affected people, social disruption, and violence, and is inadequate to account for famines in Africa. Furthermore, he has argued, on the basis of his work on Sudan, that during famines people choose not to consume rather than sell vital assets, and that most mortality related to outbreak of epidemic, not shortage of food. Meghnad Desai (1988: 108) has also criticized Sen’s theory for lacking a dynamic framework, and a way to bring out “the dynamic and simultaneous interdependence of the physical and the economic aspects of famines.” For a comprehensive review of the literature on entitlement, see Devereux (1993) 19 Drèze & Sen (1998: 205) 20 As for what “caused” the Great Leap Famine, Sen cites problems associated with collectivization; problems associated with distribution (town vs. country, communal dining); informational failure, linked to “a controlled press, which duped the public in 43 suppressing information about the famine, but in the process deluded the government as well”: and that government was immune to public pressure (Drèze & Sen 1995: 75-6) 21 Drèze & Sen (1995) 22 Drèze & Sen (1998:126) 23 Drèze & Sen (1998:212) 24 Drèze & Sen (1995:66) 25 Drèze & Sen (1995: 81-83) 26 Drèze & Sen (1998: 133-161) 27 Sen (1997) 28 Sen (1981:1) 29 Davis (2001:19) 30 Desai, quoted in Davis (2001:20) 31 This admission is quoted in Arnold (1988:45) 32 Arnold (1988: 46) 33 Drèze & Sen (1998: 85) 34 Ibid: 122 35 Ibid: 125 36 Ibid: 118 37 For an argument linking the post-1978 reform to the Great Leap Famine, see Yang (1996). 38 Moore (1966:xxii) 39 Ibid: 330 40 Ibid: 410 41 Ibid: xii 42 Drèze & Sen (1998:215) 43 Drèze & Sen (1995: 75-6) 44 Drèze and Sen (1999: 212) 45 Sen reiterates his arguments about famine and democracy/non-democracy in many of his publications. Mostly he has confined his discussion to PRC and India, but in recent years he 44 has included the Soviet Union and North Korea in the same category of non-democratic famines. See generally Sen (1999). 46 Sen (1999: 170) 47 Sen (1999: 179; Drèze & Sen 1998:133-161). 48 Keen argues that long-standing conflicts over economic resources were exacerbated by the discovery of oil in 1978, and the desire to extract the oil encouraged a government policy of depopulating oil-rich areas of the south, while the SPLA directed intense military efforts toward preventing the extraction of oil. See Keen (1994). 49 Ibid: 212 50 Drèze (1999: 1226) 51 See William Conquest, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Alec Nove, etc. 52 Bernstein (1984: 339) 53 Ibid; also see Nove (1969) 54 See Bernstein (1984: 350-351). PRC was far less willing to adopt policies that would create misery for the peasants, for obvious reasons. Per capita agricultural output in PRC in 1957 was half of that in USSR, and so whereas USSR was concerned with securing the surplus, PRC was more concerned with how to create the surplus in the first place. In the USSR party membership was 70% urban, whereas in social composition PRC was 70% rural. (Lieberthal 1997: 93) 55 See Shue (1980:6) and Liberthal (1997:87). Shue provides a careful analysis of the policies that laid the groundwork for socialist transformation: 1. high level of sophistication and specificity in planning for rural development; 2. flexibility in basic-level policy implementation; 3. all-out attacks on rural problems; 4. recruitment of activists and cadres from the local villagers to carry out rural reforms; 5. promotion of rural change was centered around village class struggle; 6. careful design and use of material incentives to draw the peasants into cooperation; and 7. a fair degree of discretion left to local cadres. 56 Yang (1996:37, 65) 57 Riskin (1990:28) 58 US Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States,1960-1961. 59 Waal quoted in Davis (2001: 21) 60 See Lieberthal (1997), Yang (1996), Riskin (1990). 61 Yang (1996:45) 62 Stalin and Molotov pushed for rapid collectivization against the advice of Andreyev, the party secretary of North Caucasus, and Shlikhter, Ukrainian commissar for agriculture, who both argued for delay. Any arguments for putting limits on excesses were crossed out by 45 Stalin. Nove argues that the condemnation of the rightists enabled the central committee to operate more consistently the line of the offensive against the kulaks (Nove 1969:161, 164). 63 Le Roy Ladurie (1971:1) 64 Tawney (1932: 102) 65 For an extended argument, see Li (1982) 66 Greenough (1982) 67 Arnold (1988:32) 68 The “renewed” interest is in reference to the long reticence that scholars have felt about the relationship between climate and society, lest it be regarded as some sort of climate determinism a la Ellsworth Huntington—that civilization cannot flourish in tropical climates that lack the marked seasonal changes of temperate zones which serve to stimulate the energies of populations. 69 Glantz (1990:182) 70 The term sustainable development owes its widespread usage to the 1987 World Commission on Economic Development (WCED) report, Our Common Future, which defined it as: Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. It contains within it two key concepts: (1) the concept of “needs,” in particular the essential needs of the world’s poor, to which overriding priority should be given; and (2) the idea of limitations imposed by the state of technology and social organization on the environment’s ability to meet present and future needs. 71 See Le Roy Ladurie (1971:1-3,7), Arnold (1988), Li (1982). 72 NASA Report of 1988, quoted in Glantz (1990:197). 73 Not only is there no written work on it, an extensive search on the Internet turned up nothing that connected the recent El Niño-connected drought with the famine in North Korea. The author has contacted scientists at NASA who confirm that North Korea belongs in the same climatic forcing as northern China, but that there is no longitudinal work done on North Korea, and no work that assesses the impact of the 1997-1998 El Niño on the 1997-1998 drought in North Korea. 74 Davis (2001:12) 75 Ibid: 213. 76 El Niño is the name given to an oceanic-atmospheric phenomenon that can generally be defined as an invasion of warm surface water from the western part of the Pacific Basin into the eastern equatorial Pacific (primarily off the coasts of Peru and Ecuador). This “pool” of warm water heats the atmosphere above it, causing cloud formation, instability in the atmosphere and, ultimately, rain. As the systems of rain-bearing clouds shift, following the location of higher sea surface temperatures, excessive rainfall patterns also shift. Thus, 46 regions that are usually arid receive excessive rainfall patterns (e.g. the arid coast of western South America), while regions that usually receive abundant rainfall (e.g. parts of Indonesia and the Philippines) experience droughts. 77 Davis (2001:18) 78 Glantz (2000) and Glantz (1990) 79 The argument is that much of the additional heat trapped by greenhouse gases is stored in an expanded ‘Warm Pool’ and deepened thermocline in the western tropical Pacific Ocean, then released in more frequent and larger El Niño events. An enhanced ENSO cycle, in other words, may be the principal modality through which global warming turns into weather. (Davis: 238) 80 Davis (2001:238) 81 See Yao (1999:1367), and Davis (2001:251) 82 Kueh (1995:102-3) 83 Arnold (1988: 8) 84 Ravallion (1997:1206, 1236) 85 Eckstein (1977: 56-59) 86 Peter Hayes (1999) in his interview with Elizabeth Farnsworth of the Public Broadcasting Service put the upper end at ten percent of the population—about 2 million people, and lower end in the range of 200,000-300,000. US Congressional staffers who visited the country concluded that from 1995 to 1998 between 900,000 and 2.4 million people have perished from starvation or hunger-related illnesses, with deaths peaking in 1997. Nongovernmental organizations, extrapolating from interviews with refugees in PRC and observations on the ground, have produced estimates of excess deaths on the order of 2.8 to 3.5 million (Noland, Robinson and Wang (1999: 1) Nicholas Eberstadt, a demographer and a long time watcher of North Korea, observed that “the number of delegates at the 1998 Supreme People’s Assembly implied a mid-1998 population more than three million fewer than demographic projections made on the basis of the 1989 census.” If the estimates are accurate, it implies a double-digit share of the pre-crisis population of roughly 22 million has succumbed. (Quoted in Noland, Robinson and Wang 1999: 1) Andrew Natsios of World Vision, who conducted relief effort in North Korea, has consistently quotes a death figure of 2-3 million for the 1995-1997 period. (Natsios 1999:1) 87 Goodkind and West (2001). The authors assume a rough parallel in the circumstances between the PRC and North Korean cases, including a putative economic transformation of massive scale, like collectivization. Needless to say, the North Korean fiasco was not caused by collectivization, and in that sense, different from the PRC instance. 88 The then head of Korean intelligence was Suh Dong Kwon. Korea responded that in an open society like theirs, a secret shipment would be impossible to hide, whereupon the idea was dropped. 47 89 Oberdorfer (1997:372) 90 Apparently the North Korean central authorities shut down the PDS in North Hamgyong, South Hamgyong, and Kangwon, preferring to focus on supplying food to the western provinces. Famine thus began in the northeast provinces two years earlier than in other areas (Natsios 1999: 2, 8-9) 91 The snafu involved North Korea flying its own flag over the boat carrying relief rice. When President Kim Young Sam’s ruling party subsequently suffered an electoral defeat, he interpreted it as the public anger over his North Korean policy and the North Korean ingratitude, and spoke out against any more food aid. The promised 150,000 tons were delivered, however (Oberdorfer 1997:374). 92 By 1996 the Korean government sought to dissuade others from providing aid, saying to US and Japan in January 1996 that the North Korean plight was not serious (Oberdorfer 1997: 374), and that in any event food aid ought to be tied to the resumption of the formal North-South talk. A week later the US went ahead and announced a $2 million contribution to the UN emergency appeal without conditions. 93 See Noland, Robinson and Wang (1999) 94 The figures of 16 percent acute malnutrition and 65 percent stunting comes from Judy Cheng-Hopkins, Director of WFP for Asia and CIS Region, and the figures for 18 percent and 62 percent for the same are for 1998 and come from UNICEF nutritional surveys. See InterAction DPRK Working Group (1999), and Natsios (1999:13). 95 Different societies perform food triage differently. During famine in South Asia, for instance, adult males tend to get preferential treatment because they are better able than other groups to work. 96 Hunter (1999:45). 97 Natsios (1999: 13-14) 98 The demand for food is difficult to compute because “the world does not know how many North Koreans there are, let alone their distribution across different demographic categories.” (Noland, Robinson and Wang 1999: 7) Likewise there is no data on caloric intake. Yet, differing assumptions regarding caloric needs and nutritional sources generate significantly different estimates of demand. For the data on domestic production, outsiders base this on planted acreage and yields. Estimates of planted acreage may not difficult, but the estimates of yields are more problematic. The ROK National Unification Board gets its data by operating experimental farms in Korea and PRC mimicking North Korean agricultural techniques. The World Food Program gets its own from selected field sampling. Data on food imports, mostly through “mirror” statistics, are also inaccurate since most of them come from the PRC, which may be misclassifying food aid in its trade statistics. Most importantly, barter trade is not reported at all. (Noland, Robinson and Wang 1999: 8) 48 99 Williams, von Hippel and Hayes (2001). 100 Cumings (1997), chapter seven. 101 Eberstadt (1999); Noland, Robinson and Wang (1999); Choe (1996) 102 Lee (1994: 511) 103 Riskin (1990: 19) 104 Prior to 1966, the basic work team used to consist of an average of 65 peasants, and assignable to a different field each day, which made it harder to forge links to land. 105 For information on North Korea’s energy regime, see the excellent paper by Williams, von Hippel and Hayes (2001). 106 Ibid: 5 107 See Woo (Woo-Cumings) (1991), chapter 2. 108 Ibid: 6 109 Meanwhile the rural ecosystems under severe stress due to the increased use of fuelwood and crop wastes as substitutes for commercial energy supplies. Inadequate energy supplies for cooking, heating, and lighting also have negative impacts on human health. See Williams, von Hippel and Hayes (2001:3) 110 North Korea is located in the north temperate zone roughly bisected by the 40 degree north latitude line, just about as the State of Pennsylvania is in the United States, but slightly larger in geographical size than Pennsylvania, and with population about 50 percent larger. Some 80 percent of the land is mountainous, with an average elevation of 440 meters above sea level, much higher than Pennsylvania where the highest mountain is only 980 meters above sea level. As for the argument that North Korea is unlikely to become selfsufficient in food production, see Noland (2000). 111 Smith and Huang (2000: 201), based on the data compiled by the authors. 112 Between 1953 and 1958, one million farms households into collectivized firms, mostly “cooperative farms,” and a small number into state farms. Cooperative farms are technically owned by the member farmers, who are paid in incomes in shares of what they produce. Between 1956-1960, grain production increased by 32 percent to a total of 3.8 million tons, according to Kim Il Sung’s proclamation (Lee 1994: 511) 113 Kornai (1991:77) 114 Lee (1994: 515) 49 115 Irrigation is one area for which accurate and details statistics exist. See Lee (1994: 515-7) 116 Ibid: 515 117 According to FAO, in 1972, North Korea fertilizer use 194 kilograms per hectare of agricultural land, lower than Japan and Korea but much higher than in PRC or Viet Nam. In 1990, however, North Korea was at the same level as Korea. Korea and Japan at the North Korean level of income would have used far less fertilizers than North Korea (Smith and Huang 2000:204). 118 Noland, Robinson and Wang (1999:1) 119 Williams, von Hippel and Hayes (2001:9) 120 Yujiro Hayami and Vernon Ruttan, in an 1970 article that compared factor prices and technical change in the US and Japan from 1880 and 1960, argued that labor abundant countries (like Japan) pursue land-saving technology (fertilizers) whereas land abundant countries (like the US) use labor-saving technology (tractors). Interestingly, North Korea made extensive use of both land-saving and labor-saving technologies. FAO data reveals that the growth rate of the number of tractors was a steady 7 percent per annum in 19611977, but jumped to 14 percent per annum in 1977-1984 as the mechanization program intensified (Smith and Huang 2000:204). 121 Williams, von Hippel and Hayes (2001:9-10) 122 See Woo (Woo-Cumings), chapter 2. 123 Smith and Huang (2000). 124 Between 1973-1975, there was a spurt in establishing facilities for fertilizers, especially for using apatite mineral for the manufacturing of phosphorous fertilizer, as well as an importation of a turnkey fertilizer plant from Western Europe—this was a deviation from its self-reliance ideology. During the second seven year plan (1978-1984), however, there was a setback in fertilizer production because acid was sent to industries before they could be sent to phosphorous factories. After 1984-1986, production of fertilizers was stagnant and uneven (Lee 1994: 521). 125 Williams et al. (2001:8) 126 See Eberstadt, Rubin and Tretyakova (1995:88). Using “mirror statistics” issued by Goskomstat, the Soviet (and now Russian) State Statistical Committee, the authors made statistical calculations about the impact of the collapse of trade with the Soviet Union. This process of reconstructing North Korea’s trade structure using the mirror statistics is a tedious process involving several steps in which different systems for categorizing trade flows are harmonized; different valuation schemes, harmonized; and different financial measurement bases reduced to a common denominator. 50 127 Ibid: 97 128 These figures are based on another “mirror statistics,” this time through the PRC’s Customs General Administration in its China’s Customs Statistics publications. See Eberstadt (1995: 673). 129 Between 1996-2000, PRC reportedly agreed to provide North Korea with 500,000 tons of grain, 1.3 million tons of crude, and 2.5 million tons of coal. PRC also announced that it donated 100,000 tons of grain to North Korea in 1995, 500,000 tons in 1996, 150,000 tons in 1997, 100,000 tons in 1998, and 1 million tons of oil between 1989-1996. See Smith and Huang (2000:205) 130 Quoted in Williams, von Hippel and Hayes (2001:11) 131 Oberdorfer (1997:370) 132 In 1995, between July-August when the country receives 60-65 percent of annual precipitation, rain was three to five times the normal level. 133 Noland, Robinson and Wang (1999:4) 134 Oberdorfer (1997), Noland, Robinson and Wang (1999), Smith and Huang (2000) all seem to agree that the North Koreans exaggerated the damage from the floods in 1995. 135 For the FAO figure, see Williams, von Hippel and Hayes (2001), figure 1 on page 3. For Smith and Huang, see their 2000 article, figure 2 on page 214. 136 Author’s correspondence with Dr. Lau, November 18, 2001. 137 Ibid. 138 Lau and Weng (2001:1, 10) 139 Editorial, ENSO Signal, January 2001 (16) 140 Erik Eckholm, New York Times, September 25, 2001. 141 New York Times, October 3, 2000, A3. 142 Babson (2001) 143 Natsios (1999:5-11) 144 Ibid:6 145 Babson (2001:88) 146 In the USSR, private and non-planned economic activities were permitted, from early on, and “peasant markets” and private plots were tolerated, with a thriving “second economy” providing for most small services. But it was never allowed to become as big as the farmer’s markets in North Korea (Gregory: 45-6) 51 147 Snyder (1997:4) 148 Garnsey (1988:39)