In N. Korea, Resilience in the Face of Famine

UNPA COUNTY, North Korea — Devastated by disastrous flooding that swept her home away two years ago, Yang Soo Bok now struggles with a more pernicious hardship: a perilous nationwide food shortage that has reduced government rations to less than a fourth of a bowl of cornmeal a day.

Yet blooming in the private garden of her newly built home is a cornucopia of 12 crops, including lettuce, pumpkin, corn and wheat. She has two fruit trees and also is raising a pig and three chickens.

Yang’s private food supply, which feeds her household of three, is part of a spreading wave of efforts across North Korea to stave off threats of mass starvation amid dwindling aid from the isolated Communist regime.

As slow famine grips this land, giving rise to sensational and unconfirmed reports of cannibalism, child-selling and hundreds of thousands of deaths in outlying areas, a rare visit to North Korea provided a different national portrait--of self-control and stoic struggle, of a single-minded focus on creative ways to survive a looming disaster.

Residents here told The Times that they are coping with the food crisis by supplementing rations with alternatives, many self-gathered, including mountain roots added to rice, corncobs ground to powder for cakes, and seaweed stir-fried or made into noodles. They are dipping into private reserves of rations hoarded over the past several months and selling off household goods to buy food in the swelling number of private markets that officials began to tolerate last year.

The private efforts are not confined to Yang and her neighbors in Unpa County, one of the nation’s breadbaskets. In the capital, Pyongyang, where workers in sunglasses and neat suits scurry to work on buses, the terraces of concrete apartment buildings have been transformed into food production centers with miniature vegetable plots and rabbit-breeding grounds.

“Eating namul [edible wild plants] is nothing new. . . . It’s just that we’re eating more of it these days,” said Li Sung Suk, 50, a Pyongyang cleric. “It’s not easy. But our people are firmly united to overcome this national difficulty.”

No one knows precisely whether it is these private efforts that are keeping mass starvation at bay. North Korean officials acknowledge scattered cases of starvation deaths among the elderly along with spreading malnutrition among children--some of whom were woefully thin and had discolored brown hair and white patches on their faces.

In Unpa, where people have sustained themselves with chewy mountain arrowroot and sour but edible plants not normally eaten, as many as 30 children are hospitalized every 10 days for malnutrition, said Cho Hyun Sook, chairwoman of the county’s economic administration unit.

The International Committee of the Red Cross recently estimated that malnutrition afflicts just 16% of North Koreans, compared with 30% in India.

Aid Agencies Marvel at Widespread Fortitude

Even aid agencies have marveled that the North Korean fortitude--perhaps at least partly a result of the government’s longtime doctrine of juche, or self-reliance--has helped stave off what might, by now, have developed into a full-blown catastrophe among a less resilient people.

“In most countries, if they were confronted with as serious a food shortage as North Korea is facing at this moment, I think we would have seen megadeaths already,” said Tun Myat, a frequent visitor to North Korea as a representative of the U.N. World Food Program based in Rome. “But people there have very developed coping mechanisms.”

Given such demonstrated survival skills, sharp differences of opinion are emerging over how well the North Koreans can sustain themselves until the autumn rice harvest.

In a special alert issued last week, the World Food Program announced that food stocks were depleted in half the nation’s 10 public distribution centers, which serve three-fourths of the civilian population, with the rest due to be gone by June 20. About 1.3 million tons of food aid must be supplied “if a large-scale human catastrophe is to be avoided,” the organization announced.

But the South Korean government, based on its own monitoring of its neighbor, has calculated that North Korea can make do until the autumn rice harvest by relying on summer crops, such as potatoes and corn, and new harvests of barley. One reason for the discrepancy is that the South Koreans calculate a person’s daily grain requirement at 150 grams, figuring the northerners can squeak through on such low levels for a few more months. The World Food Program, however, pegs its level at 450 grams, still just 75% of what it says are internationally recognized as minimum caloric requirements.

“The crisis is over in North Korea,” declared Ryoo Chong Ryul of the National Unification Ministry in Seoul.

Experts See Systemic Problems Persisting

In any case, most experts agree that no matter how much emergency food aid is poured into North Korea, long-term, systemic problems are certain to continue bedeviling this land.

In recent years, the government has begun reforms to improve worker incentives and crop yields, such as allowing farmers to keep 30% of their harvests. But the simple fact of North Korea’s geography--limited arable land and a harsh climate--makes it virtually impossible for it to attain self-sufficiency in feeding itself, said John Dyck, a U.S. Agriculture Department specialist on the country.

“Not even U.S. agriculture in North Korea, with all of its technology, could make it self-sufficient,” Dyck said, adding that a growing population and lower crop yields caused by exhausted soils had created North Korea’s dependency on imports by the mid-1980s.

“They are going to be in this situation every year, and I don’t know how long aid can be counted on to meet the gap,” Dyck added. “The main problems are the rest of the economy and the trading system. North Korea has to be able to buy the food it needs.”

For now, that seems difficult, because virtually no one is willing to extend significant credit to a nation plagued with a poor record of honoring commercial commitments. A $4-million barter deal involving 20,000 tons of wheat from U.S. grain giant Cargill Inc. has been canceled because Pyongyang has not come up with the zinc shipments promised in return.

Americans are barred from trading with the nation under an embargo that is not likely to be lifted until Pyongyang comes to the peace table with South Korea, the United States and China and cooperates on such issues as inter-Korean talks and cessation of missile sales. The four parties would also begin discussions on how to end the nearly five-decade Korean War, which technically continues, albeit in a state of cease-fire.

And despite cautious efforts to set up a free-trade zone in the northern border area of Rajin, international investors continue to balk at the regime’s unpredictability, secrecy and insufficient legal protections. In addition, many experts assert that North Korea could buy more food with its estimated $1 billion in annual export earnings but chooses instead to spend that on other priorities, devoting a fourth of its budget to defense.

“Is it buying rocket components?” one international Korea specialist asked. “Should we help feed a people who can aim those rockets at us?”

Despite the complex political and economic problems, most North Koreans are consumed with far more basic needs.

During a five-day visit, a Times photographer witnessed what seemed to be an entire nation mobilized for survival. In bare feet and plastic rain gear, hundreds of villagers stooped over muddy rice fields to plant the precious shoots that would offer sustenance in the coming months. Vans with mounted speakers played music to encourage workers.

So important are these collective tasks that officials say they bus city dwellers to the fields during planting season--along with soldiers, students aged 14 and 17, and construction workers--bringing nonessential projects to a standstill.

Since last winter, for instance, Pyongyang cleric Li has spent each Friday spreading manure and silt from the river bottom over farmland to prepare it for planting. To help the national survival campaign, she has also sold back more than 220 pounds of hoarded rice to the government at five times the price she paid for it.

“As far as I know, lots of people have turned in their rice savings to the government in the last two years,” said Li, an assistant minister with the Bong Soo Church.

Other villagers labored to clear precious farmland of gravel and dirt deposited by two years of floods. And everywhere, it seemed, people roamed the roads and the hills in search of food. Many carried on their backs green canvas sacks filled with wild edible plants.

Three years of disasters--hailstorms in 1994 and floods in 1995 and 1996--wiped out much of North Korea’s southern breadbasket. Those events came on top of dramatic external events, beginning with the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, North Korea’s major supplier of fuel. That idled tractors and fertilizer factories as the country began sliding into its agricultural crisis.

Another shock came in 1995, when China abruptly canceled grain exports to all nations, including 600,000 tons to North Korea. Although China renewed exports to its Communist ally the following year, providing half the shipment of 500,000 tons for free, the flooding and previous year’s shortage wiped out much of Pyongyang’s grain reserves, said Selig Harrison, a North Korea specialist with the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington.

“Everything hit North Korea at once,” Harrison said.

The lack of fertilizer, fuel and workable farm machinery continues to stymie efforts to coax more bounty from the land. But North Koreans seem to be tackling their tasks gamely.

“Many rice fields are still covered with gravel. We are not getting the supply of crude oil, gasoline and diesel fuel in a timely manner,” said one Pyongyang official, adding that it took more than four hours to make the 100-mile journey from the capital to the northern border city of Sinuiju, which was heavily hit by flooding from the Yalu River.

But, he said, “instead of asking for outside help, we are trying to be self-sufficient.”

Fuel Shortage a Looming Hurdle

The fuel problem, however, looms as one of the largest obstacles in getting the growing supplies of international aid to the hungry populace. During a recent trip to North Korea, members of the Los Angeles-based Korean-American Sharing Movement saw train cars filled with bags of grain left idle on the Chinese side of the border because North Korea lacked fuel to transport them across.

The group’s 1,000 tons of corn, purchased in the Chinese city of Dalian with $170,000 of $300,000 in donations raised so far, was eventually moved across the Yalu to Sinuiju after special arrangements had been made with China. But Paek Young Ho, general secretary of the North Korean Red Cross Society, acknowledged that supplies cannot always be promptly moved because of fuel shortages and a growing Chinese reluctance to provide the train cars, which are not always promptly returned.

Other problems, officials say, include a widespread misunderstanding--even disinformation--about their operations that could be inhibiting more generous aid offers. In one prominent flap recently, Seoul “confirmed” reports in the Japanese, South Korean and Portuguese media that North Korean soldiers had seized at gunpoint nearly 5,000 tons of World Food Program maize, fueling concerns about diversion of international aid to the military.

But after the program issued a denial and a press release denouncing the report as a “blatant disinformation campaign,” South Korea issued a correction. Myat said his organization carefully monitors all shipments, including by means of spot checks at nurseries, hospitals and other targeted recipients, to make sure the food has been properly distributed. In 19 months, the group has not experienced one case of diverted supplies, he said.

“Every delivery . . . has been scrupulously adhered to,” he said.

Myat also denounced as “rubbish” reports of parents selling children for food and of cannibalism, along with other sensational tales.

Secretive Regime Given Share of Blame

Others, however, lay the blame for the murky uncertainty surrounding the food shortages squarely on North Korea’s secretive regime. The most effective way to promote an accurate understanding, they say, would be for the regime to open up.

North Korean officials acknowledge that the military receives food from a separate distribution system, but they declined to answer questions about the size of military rice reserves, calling it a “national secret.” One knowledgeable source, however, said the military has stockpiled reserves to last several years, the amount Pyongyang believes is necessary to sustain the force in the event of attack.

“We are prepared to protect our national sovereignty,” a North Korean official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Watanabe reported from Tokyo and Kang from Unpa. Times staff writer Rone Tempest contributed to this report from Beijing.