North Korea Loosens Controls to Combat Starvation
The country might well experience a famine as serious as China's famine of the early 1960s, says the Institute's Scott Snyder.
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Above: Bridge leading from Tumen, China, into North Korea. Left: Scott Snyder and his guide, Cho Kyong-hook, from Yanji, China. |
ully one-fourth of the inhabitants of many villages in northern North Korea have died of starvation and related diseases resulting from the country's food crisis, reports Scott Snyder, program officer in the U.S. Institute of Peace's Research and Studies Program and specialist in Korean affairs. The severity of conditions throughout the country has forced the central government to loosen controls in order to combat the situation. Snyder recently returned from a trip to Beijing and Changchun, Yanji, and Shenyang, located in provinces that border North Korea. He interviewed refugees from North Korea, ethnic Koreans living in China, and Chinese and Korean-Chinese specialists on North Korea.
"Refugees I spoke with from remote northern villages reported that people around them were 'dropping like flies' at the height of the food crisis last fall," says Snyder. They reported incidences of cannibalism, families selling their children for food, and the population stripping bark from trees to ward off starvation. The refugees said that the central government had halted food distributions throughout mountainous northern and northeastern parts of the country more than two years ago and has since then confined international food deliveries--and thus international monitoring of the crisis--to less remote cities and villages. "That explains why the magnitude of the humanitarian tragedy in North Korea exceeds estimates of international organizations, which have depended on the central government for information about the food shortages," says Snyder.
In the face of this emergency, the central government has been forced to relax controls on internal movements to allow people to forage for food, which has resulted in an increased flow of refugees to Chinese border areas. Also, economic responsibility has devolved to provincial, city, and town authorities. In this context, black markets in the north and northeast now trade openly several times a week, and hundreds of new trading representatives reporting to local governments have cropped up along the border with China, Snyder says.
These power shifts and economic changes are apparent to neighboring Chinese, who also have observed an influx into the Chinese border area of South Korean businessmen and tourists. China has maintained economic relations with the North and given substantial aid to forestall a collapse. Although Chinese scholars do not seem to think a collapse of the North Korean government is imminent, Snyder says, this was "the first time I heard them say that a collapse is possible."
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