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NORTH KOREA'S DILEMMA
MAY 21, 1996
TRANSCRIPT
Facing the real possibility of famine, North Korea's government has allowed United Nations relief officials into its usually-closed borders. Elizabeth Farnsworth discusses the plight this secluded nation.
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Next tonight, hunger in North Korea. The country has suffered serious food shortages since flooding last summer wiped out much of the food stocks and new harvest.The government in Pyongyang, traditionally reluctant to admit the need for help, requested and received some food aid from abroad, but few outsiders have had a chance to observe the situation directly.
We talk now to someone who has, Douglas Coutts, director of the North American office of the World Food Program, a U.N. agency and the largest international food aid organization in the world. He recently returned from a two-week monitoring trip to North Korea. Thank you for being with us. How serious is the situation now? How serious is the hunger?
DOUGLAS COUTTS, World Food Program: I think the situation has been very much under-stated and also not well understood. The country has been so isolated for so long that it's been very difficult for us to get a handle on how serious the situation actually has developed.
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And how serious is it? Did you see people that were very thin, malnourished, people that have--clearly don't have enough to eat?
MR. COUTTS: I spent most of my time outside of the capital, out in the flood-affected areas visiting families, monitoring the food distribution, talking to people about how they are actually coping. People like myself in this business have cut our teeth in the African famine situation, and it's clearly a very serious situation along the lines of what could then develop to be a famine later on. The problem is that the people are coping very differently than you would find elsewhere in the world.
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: How are they coping?
MR. COUTTS: They are coping at this stage by gathering a lot of the wild roots and wild vegetables and herbs and greens at a time when they as farmers should be out in their lands preparing the, the rice paddies and such for the spring planting. The spring has been very much delayed there, and we're very much concerned that much of their time is spent gathering food instead of helping to, to plant and get ready to feed themselves.
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Explain a little bit about how you, you organized this trip, how you got around. This is unusual, I gather. You were given a freedom that people don't usually have.
MR. COUTTS: Yes, that's right.
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Describe what you did.
MR. COUTTS: Well, first off, let me just explain that the--this is unprecedented in North Korean history for them to have asked a U.N. agency such as ours to come into a system in an emergency. They've had emergencies before, never before a flood of this type, the worst in 100 years. We made it very clear up front that we would operate in their country as we do in any country, where they have an emergency food situation, which means complete access, and we need to be able to monitor completely from the dock all the way to the mouth of the beneficiary. We made this very clear from the beginning and I have to say we have been able to do that by and large. What I did is I went there to help our country office monitor at a time where much of the food was arriving. We had two ships arrive within a few weeks of one another.
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And you were looking at how that is distributed. How's the government handling that?
MR. COUTTS: Extremely well. It's an extremely well organized government. They are very much preoccupied with the food situation. They realize they're in very rough shape. And they are completely living up to the agreements we signed with them. I want to make it clear we're not distributing all this food directly on our own. We have four international staff in the country who travel around the country checking at very key spots as to how good a distribution system is going, and it's going exactly as we had all agreed, that is, we are targeting roughly 10 percent of the population who were most affected by the floods. They lost their homes, their animals, and their food stocks, most importantly.
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Are the problems worse in the city or in the countryside?
MR. COUTTS: Most worst in the countryside, because it's the collective farmers who are completely outside what we call the public distribution system in the country. Sixty five percent of the, of the population of 23 million benefit from the public distribution system. They receive a set ration every month from the government. The collective farms are outside that. This is why they're most affected by the floods because all of their food was wiped out, that they had growing, as well as their stocks at home. Normally of course they produce food and they send it to the central government, the central government then uses it in the country. This is a situation where government has had to send food to them, and they don't have it.
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: The flood is an immediate cause of this problem but there are longer-term problems. Could you describe some of those. For example, why can't North Korea simply pay cash and import some food? Explain why not.
MR. COUTTS: Well, first off, uh, you might say that this flood has been the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back. Indeed, they've had a number of structural problems in their agricultural sector for a number of years. They only had 20 percent of their land which is arable. It is a very cool country. It's a climate similar to that of Quebec. They, umm, they have a very short growing season. They have had a number of problems with agriculture in the past couple of years whereby their productivity has very much gone down, plus the fact they have had problems in earning foreign exchange, hard currency, and they're to the point now where their credit rating is not very, very high in the world markets, and they are not able to commercially import what most countries would otherwise do to make up the gap between what they need and what they produce.
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: What--when you were traveling--in the--let's say in the collective farms--what signs of hunger did you see?
MR. COUTTS: What we call a number of pre-famine indicators. One of them was the collection of these wild herbs and grasses and things that I mentioned before. You have to keep in mind that typically a collective farmer in North Korea has his or her bowl of rice and then he or she would have various condiments around that rice, these wild grasses and herbs in this season. The problem now is that the rice is a condiment on the side, if he's lucky, and he is mainly consuming large quantities of these grasses that they collect. It fills the stomach but very little energy.
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Um-hmm, and North Korea has been trying to get aid and has--in recent months only gotten aid from a couple of places, right, although they've been negotiating with the United States, Thailand, China, India? Why have they not gotten more aid recently?
MR. COUTTS: Well, we have, we have raised roughly 20,000 tons, $8 million, 2 million from the U.S., the rest from a number of other key countries. The problem is that what we are doing is very much of a band-aid approach at this stage. We are simply trying to help the government keep these farmers in the flood-affected areas going until the next harvest. Beyond that, what the country needs is what we call program food aid, government to government food aid, hundreds of thousands of tons, which we as an international aid agency can never source. That has to be big countries in the region who have an interest in helping, No. 1, and No. 2, the government will need assistance in commercially importing the amount of food that they need.
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And that's not happening.
MR. COUTTS: At this point, I have to say we pressed the government very, very hard on this as to what the specific plans were on the commercial side, and, uh, they have very little in the pipeline at this stage.
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Is the--the hunger, this crisis getting mixed up with politics?
MR. COUTTS: Well, that's always the case--
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: There's a lot going on among--
MR. COUTTS: Obviously.
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: --Japan--
MR. COUTTS: Yes.
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: --South Korea, North Korea, China, the U.S..
MR. COUTTS: Clearly. Fortunately, in, in my business, I don't have to worry about being a political analyst too often, but indeed politics play very much of a, of a key role. Uh, we try to explain to the government in our work that because they have been so isolated for so long, it's, it's difficult. Many donors want to know more about their system, and it's our job in helping them that they need to help us explain how their system works because it is a very unusual system.
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Did you consider it something of an opening that you were allowed to do this?
MR. COUTTS: Absolutely. And this is very much unprecedented, that we have had free access, again not just in the main cities but in the rural areas, that is, that is fairly unusual. And, again, we are not dealing with the government and communities with a hand-out mentality here. They have a system of self-reliance at all different levels of government. We found in many cases that counties and provinces who are stuck with their food supplies now don't have enough, are getting into all kinds of very unusual barter trade arrangements in China. This is a government that normally completely manages everything centrally.
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Thank you so much for being with us.
MR. COUTTS: Thank you.
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