A Tale of Food and No Fuel – Part II: North Korea
Written by Laura Miller
05. Sep, 2010 
2 Comments
If Ramadan is the supposed to be the month of fasting and sympathizing with the world’s hungry, then there is one country whose people take the cake (so to speak) for going through unimaginable starvation and suffering during the 1990s.
The culture and spirit of North Korea, after the Korean War of the early 1950s, has been defined by the ideology of juche, or self-reliance. Theoretically, juche sounds like a good idea for a country resisting the materialistic capitalism of the West; it encompasses economic self-sufficiency and cultural preservation, which are similar principles that the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, up until recently, employed to keep “Westernization” at bay. But juche also entails impenetrable isolationism and undying loyalty to the Communist Party. And in reality, for much of its history North Korea wasn’t so self-sufficient. Although North Korea, unlike sugarcane-exporting Cuba, had made it a priority to feed its population (even outstripping South Korean rice production during the 1980s), agriculture was heavily reliant on inputs from the Soviet Union (fertilizers, pesticides, fossil fuels for farm machinery, and so on).
When the Soviet Union fell apart in 1989, North Koreans faced the same scenario as the Cubans – where to go from here? If Pyongyang had followed a similar path as Havana – making local, sustainable food production and soil conservation a top priority – famine might have been prevented. Instead, different dynamics were coming together to make the 1990s a disastrous decade for North Korea. First, over-reliance on industrialized agriculture had ruined North Korean farmland – the soils were eroded and the riverbeds were silting. Second, heavy rainfall on this already-degraded land caused epic floods, which destroyed millions of tons of grain. Third, not until 1996 did the government admit there was a food shortage, and that North Korea badly needed food aid (which ended up arriving too little, too late, after the peak of the famine). Up until then, the government had been launching a “Let’s Eat Two Meals Per Day” campaign to reduce peoples’ food consumption. Finally – and perhaps most important of all – just as the drying up of Soviet-subsidized fuel impacted daily life in Cuba (erratic electricity supply and so forth), so too did it impact North Korea’s state-controlled Public Distribution System (PDS), which was responsible for rationing food. No fuel meant no means of transporting food (what little of it wasn’t lost to flooding) to the PDS.
In her brilliant book Nothing to Envy, American journalist Barbara Demick describes how ordinary North Koreans – particularly women – had to get “creative” in obtaining food, since they could no longer rely on the PDS. They would use tree bark powder or sawdust as substitutes for flour. They would make cornmeal from kernels (if they were lucky) – and also from the husks and cobs. They would add grass to soup. They would pluck dandelions and weeds from the mountains. They would pick corn kernels from farm animal excrement and wash them off. They would sleep during “lunchtime” so as to conserve calories. They would resort to eating dogs, rats, and frogs – to the point of decimating North Korea’s frog population. Garlic and cooking oil became luxury items. Cottage industries and black markets for food, although technically illegal, started mushrooming as a way for people to make fast money. Even then, private food production had its limitations (for example, you can’t produce homemade tofu if you don’t have fuel for cooking the soybeans).
Official statistics are hard to come by, but as many as three million people may have died during the famine of the 1990s. Even today, the famine isn’t necessarily “over” – it’s just that now North Korea receives a lot of food aid from the United Nations, South Korea, Japan, and China. Barbara Demick, in an interview with The New Yorker, says that North Koreans continue to die quietly at home from illnesses related to malnutrition. Malnutrition has stunted the physical growth (and mental development) of an entire generation of North Korean children and young adults. In reaction to the breakdown of the PDS, private enterprise – of food, and also pharmaceuticals and Japanese electronic goods – have been making a comeback. In 2002, Pyongyang actually granted farmer’s markets semi-legal status, although recently their attitude toward private food production has been wishy-washy – they’ll arbitrarily close down some markets, and then allow them to reopen two months later. The future of food security in North Korea looks highly uncertain, but we can only hope that it doesn’t become as dire as the famine of the 1990s.
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