Proponents of engagement or isolation will find evidence to support both sides in this book. Adopting Amartya Sen's thesis associating famines with nondemocratic regimes, authors Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland contend that governments that are not accountable to their citizens lack both the information and the incentives to respond effectively to crises such as famines. Suggesting that “the deepest roots of North Korea's food problems must be found in the very nature of the North Korean economic and political system” (p. 3), Haggard and Noland argue that socialist systems are particularly responsible for entitlement failures because the state directly controls the economy, establishing a close relationship among regime type, rights, and famine.
The book not only discusses the North Korean famine in detail, amassing the most comprehensive data on the situation to date (although based on secondary sources), but also aims to shed light on the causes of famines more generally and on lessons for the humanitarian community. The authors tackle head-on difficult moral dilemmas about whether to provide assistance even if some portions are diverted to the elite, prolonging the life of a despotic regime. Their evaluation of aid is not limited to black and white answers but considers unintended consequences of aid diversion that lead to marketization and reform. They conclude by considering the potential transition from socialism and prospects for regime change. But all of these issues hang on where they locate the cause of the famine.
Scholarship on this issue is divided between those who see external causes as major factors, pointing to the collapse of the Soviet bloc in the early 1990s, aggravated by a series of floods and droughts since the mid-1990s, and those who see internal political and economic policies as the driving force behind the famine. While acknowledging external causes, the authors lay the responsibility for the famine squarely on the North Korean government, citing the systemic failure of the public distribution system and the “military first” policy that prioritized military security over social welfare, by showing that food consumption already had been in steady decline years before the floods, as evidenced by the “let's eat one meal a day campaign” and reports of food shortages beginning in 1991. Although the authors see “no evidence that particular segments of the population were deliberately starved” (p. 10), the most damning piece of evidence indicting the North Korean government is that food aid was used to offset food imports to use the savings for other priorities rather than for additional food supply. The authors point to “this combination of failure to adjust, falling commercial imports in the face of rising aid, and continued military expenditures and luxury imports in the face of famine deaths” (p. 50) to hold the North Korean state culpable for crimes against humanity.
This line of argument is nothing new. Where the authors make a contribution is in their discussion of humanitarian aid. The key question here centers around diversion, and the authors make a critical distinction between centralized versus decentralized diversion. While most accusations of diversion imply state involvement in a centrally coordinated attempt at diverting aid to the political and military elite, the authors point out that decentralized diversion is more likely, taking place at the local county level even within the official public distribution system because of the wide margin between market and official prices. In the process, food aid may not only be diverted to the elite, but, more often, finds its way to targeted groups, albeit through the market rather than for free. The authors assess aid diversion to be as large as 30 percent or more, leading to increased marketization of the North Korean economy.
While their argument about aid diversion and marketization follows that of Andrew Natsios's earlier report (“The Politics of Famine in North Korea,” Special Report of the U.S. Institute of Peace, August 2, 1999), the question remains whether marketization can be taken for granted as a positive sign. The authors have an implicit faith in marketization, believing that private markets would have allowed people to fend for themselves to find alternative sources of food, less dependent on the government. But command economies are not the only conditions under which people are made economically vulnerable. Nor would opening to the global market necessarily solve the shortage of food. Market economies are just as relentless, as poignantly proven during the recent economic crisis. A one-to-one correlation between regime type and famine is too simplistic a model. Political considerations and social classification are not unique to North Korea (economic classes are no less pernicious), nor is the emphasis on the military as evident in the disproportionate American military spending relative to expenditures on health care, education, and other social programs.
The authors rightly conclude that “the debate about political change in North Korea has focused for too long on the issue of collapse, ignoring political sources of resilience and failing to consider alternative paths of change within the existing system” (p. 228). They advocate engagement and continued food aid as the only morally acceptable policy, while making a strong case against unconditional aid to foster basic changes toward a “free and open” society. They conclude with a quote from Kang Ch'ŏl-hwan, the former North Korean political prisoner made famous by his visit to the George W. Bush White House: “If you hold a cow by its hoof, it will starve; if you allow it to roam, it will find grass and eat” (pp. 241–42). But what kind of grass will it find? That is the question.
This book will be of interest to those in the Korean studies field as well as among humanitarian and public policy circles, opening the difficult conversation on how best to deal with disasters such as famines in a world that only promises to be ecologically more unpredictable.
