Looming Humanitarian Crisis or That Didn’t Take Long

Over the last couple weeks, N Korea seems to already have taken a step back from their earlier claims of self-sufficiency and have begun to ask for aid. This coming only months after the removal of the World Food Program and other foreign NGOs that had been feeding a sizable portion of their population. Seoul received a request for 150,000 tons of fertilizers and the UN WFP reported requests for food aid. Both groups quickly capitulated. Seoul obliged the North and has been going through the process of sending the fertilizers northward and the WFP drew up a $100mln aid package that is currently under review. Apparently this has ruffled some feathers in the US congress and Senator Brownback has written Amb. Bolton to see that he doesn’t let the WFP plan go through unless it is adequately monitored (ht: Korea Liberator). Another source of aid is a rice bank that S Korean farmers are setting up to send rice to NK. Korea Liberator has a better rundown of this here, but the gist seems to be that the farmers have set up a system that would sell surplus rice (not even give it away). And monitoring? Of course not.

So the question that needs to be asked, and about which we don’t have a clear conception, is what state the food distribution and food availability is in N Korea. One worry is that this reversal of direction on foreign aid (though certainly not complete) is evidence of a coming famine, or at least drastic shortage. For the sake of the N Korean people, let’s hope that isn’t the case.