ASIA: North Koreans Flee Looming Famine

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Oct 31 2006 (IPS) - The recent arrest of 91 North Korean defectors in Thailand’s northernmost province of Chiang Rai has brought into relief the conditions driving such flight: hunger and growing food shortages, according to humanitarian agencies.

The recent arrest of 91 North Korean defectors in Thailand’s northernmost province of Chiang Rai has brought into relief the conditions driving such flight: hunger and growing food shortages, according to humanitarian agencies.

And international organisations monitoring the Stalinist nation have a dire warning: the current trickle of asylum seekers to South-east Asia could become a flood because of growing signs that the country may be on the verge of a famine.

North Korea is ‘’just as vulnerable to famine today as it was in the mid-1990s” Peter Beck, Northeast Asia director of the International Crisis Group (ICG), said in an IPS interview. ‘’The government policies are still failing and the North (Korea) is more isolated than ever before.”

Feeding this crisis is Pyongyang’s decision since late 2005 to reintroduce the public distribution system of food ‘’that collapsed in the 1990s,” leading to the famine, he adds. ‘’All grain was collected and distributed by the state until the mid-1990s when this system broke down.”

His comments echo a warning made a week before in an ICG report on the ‘’thousands of desperate North Koreans who are fleeing their country.” In that study, the Brussels-based think-tank said that ‘’hunger and the lack of economic opportunity, rather than political oppression, are the most important factors in shaping a North Korean’s decision to leave.”

The World Food Programme (WFP) is also sounding the alarm as winter approaches, making it difficult for North Koreans already struggling to fill their stomachs to find alternative sources of nourishment in the country’s forests.

‘’WFP is concerned that a food shortage may occur in the coming months and that this could lead to the famine conditions that existed in the country in prior years,” Paul Risely, a WFP spokesman, said in a telephone interview from Beijing. ‘’The coming winter could be bad. It could lead to a movement of people out of the country.”

The North Korean regime, led by the reclusive President Kim Jong-il, has done the country no favours. It has worsened the signs of impoverishment that had emerged around mid-way this year by pressing ahead with its military ambitions – firing a series of long-range missiles in July and testing a nuclear device in early October.

‘’The situation has got dire, very grim, particularly after the food cutbacks to the country following the missile tests and the nuclear explosion,” Vitit Muntarbhorn, the U.N. human rights envoy for North Korea, told IPS. ‘’Countries are hesitant to offer aid because of the nuclear crisis.”

South Korea’s stance typifies this attitude. ‘’South Korea has suspended its food assistance. The food promised at the end of 2005 had not been shipped by May,” says Risely. ‘’There are lower levels of food coming from China, too.”

Nature also played its part, adding to North Korea’s woes this year. Heavy floods in July affected land where rice, potatoes and some wheat are grown, destroying nearly 10 percent of the harvest.

‘’The floods caused damage to farmland, transportation, infrastructure, and homes and buildings,” states the ICG report. ‘’After visiting the region in July, the WFP estimated 50,000-60,000 people had been left homeless and 90,000 tons of cereals lost from harvest.”

Even under normal circumstances, the country, which has been ruled with an iron grip by a communist regime since 1948, has to contend with other problems. They include limited arable land, lack of agriculture machinery and inputs and a continuing energy crisis, impacting cereal production, states the WFP.

The predicament that North Korean citizens face comes less than a year after Pyongyang called for an end to the food emergency programme of the WFP in late 2005. That aid package, launched eight years before, succeeded in supplying over six million tons of food to the country following the famine in the 1990s, during which between half a million to three million North Koreans died.

Up to the end of last year, the WFP was feeding nearly a third of North Korea’s 23-million population. Even during those years, reports by U.N. agencies suggested that malnutrition was widespread, with about 37 percent of the children stunted and 23 percent children underweight.

The need for such international food aid became more apparent after studies confirmed that even in the best of times – a good harvest – North Korean is unable to meet its basic food requirements. ‘’While grain production did improve in 2005, the harvest still fell short of estimated annual food needs by one to two million tons,” reveals the ICG report, ‘Perilous Journeys: The Plight of North Koreans in China and Beyond.”

With little sign of improvement in the offing, flight from the country to escape hunger has become a major ‘’push factor,” it adds, with North Korean deserters looking for new paths – most of them perilous – other than the usual journey into China. Of them, ‘’the southern route to South-east Asia has emerged as the most frequently used over the last several years.”

Vietnam, Laos and Burma have figured in this escape route, in addition to Thailand. In August, 175 North Koreans were arrested by the authorities in Bangkok, bringing to 400 the number of North Korean defectors who had crossed into Thailand this year. In 2005, by contrast, authorities had arrested only 80 asylum seekers.

While troubled by the influx, Thai authorities have limited options to stop the flow, often down the Mekong River, which flows through southern China down to Vietnam’s southern coast.

‘’We are not happy that Thailand is being used as a transit point for the North Koreans. We view this as a kind of human trafficking,” Songphol Sukchan, director of the press division at the foreign ministry, told IPS. ‘’The government is trying to coordinate with the countries concerned to get to the root causes of the problem. North Korea is also in the picture.”