The North Korean Famine
According to some estimates, as many as three million people died in the North Korean famine of the mid-1990s.
June 2002
he North Korean famine of the mid-1990s was perhaps the worst humanitarian disaster of that decade, says former U.S. Institute of Peace fellow Andrew P. Natsios.
Currently administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, Natsios has studied famines for more than a decade. On April 30 at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, he discussed the North Korean famine and some of its foreign policy implications. This famine is the subject of his book The Great North Korean Famine: Famine, Politics, and Foreign Policy (U.S. Institute of Peace Press, 2001).
Natsios' book has "played a prominent role" in bringing the North Korean famine to the world's attention and has helped us "focus on rending policy choices," Institute president Richard H. Solomon stated in his introductory remarks. "How do you balance moral values against political, diplomatic, and geostrategic interests? How do you deal with a situation of deciding, as a president or prime minister or secretary of state, whether you should send food to hungry people living under the control of a hostile state?"
Regime Survival A Top Priority
Faced with a massive food shortage, the North Korean government "made a choice," Natsios said. Making the regime's survival its top priority, the government decided that food would go to the country's elite and its military forces. Most citizens, especially those who lived in regions or worked in industries that the government deemed "unproductive," were considered expendable. As many as three million people may have died.
Before the famine, North Korea relied on food and oil subsidies, mostly from the former Soviet Union. When that aid declined and a series of natural disasters occurred, the North Korean government cut food rations to farmers. Many people started hoarding and stealing. The system collapsed. In Natsios' view, North Koreans lost faith in the state.
The international community, too, failed to take sufficient humanitarian action, Natsios believes. Wilson Center director Lee H. Hamilton commented, "This is a troubling book both because of the human misery it describes and because, in the author's judgment, the response to the catastrophe by the international community, including the United States, was woefully, and perhaps deliberately, inadequate."
