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Chapter 2 Literature Review
In this chapter, the literature review is divided into three parts: human security, food security, and foreign food aid. Each of these is directly related to the famine in North Korea. The concept of human security was first mentioned in the UNDP's 1994 Human Development Report. It brought low politics issues such as food, health, and the environment into the field of international politics. Food security is one of the dimensions of human security. When discussing foreign food aid, the author focuses not only on international organizations, such as FAO, WFP and IFDA, but also on the bilateral food aid from neighboring countries, including China, South Korea and other major countries.
2-1 Human Security
Realism and liberalism are two traditional approaches to the study of international security. Among critical approaches to the study of security, referent objects are expanded to include individuals, and securitization studies and constructivist approaches are often adopted in analyzing human security topics in the post-Cold War era. Critical approaches to security studies have some common themes.
They move away from the state as the sole referent object of security – that is, beyond state security. With military threat not considered as the sole form of threat, they are concerned with “creating a better world” instead of enjoying the “absence of war.”
They focus on issues related to non-traditional security or non-military aspects of security. They also question the privileged status of the state in traditional IR theory and turn to questions of how individuals are threatened by crime, pollution, scarcity,
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disease, economic collapse, poverty, poor education, political oppression, and so on.
They argue that the state itself might be a source of insecurity and that some states cannot provide their people with an adequate quality of life, democracy, liberty, or economic prosperity. For human security, the referent object is personal or individual.
Among other issues, the threat is related to unemployment, disease, and scarcity, and the attainment of security is referred to as access to basic food supplies, socio-economic justice, freedom of expression, and so on.
The first major statement concerning human security appeared in the 1994 Human Development Report, an annual publication of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP 1994). With the end of Cold War and decreasing military threats, the concept of human security has become more prevalent. As the United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan said, “the need for a more human-centered approach to security is reinforced by the continuing dangers that weapons of mass destruction, most notably nuclear weapons, pose to humanity: their very name reveals their scope and their intended objective, if they were ever used” (Annan 2000).
The definition of security was once restricted to the study of the threat and use of military force with a concern for its control and management in international politics. Human security is expected to cover both the old concepts of state security and the new non-state threats, by embracing the notions of protection and human rights (Adelman 2001).
There are different definitions regarding human security, but these could be separated into two main aspects. One is safety from chronic threats, such as hunger,
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disease and repression, and the other is protection from sudden and hurtful disruptions in the patterns of daily life, whether in homes, in jobs or in communities. According to the UNDP’s definition, categories of human security include economic security, food security, health security, environmental security, personal security, community security and political security (UNDP 1994). These definitions are pretty broad, so Professor Paris concludes that any kinds of unexpected or irregular discomfort could constitute a threat to one’s security (Paris 2011). In other words, human security can be treated as an emerging paradigm, which challenges the traditional concept of national security by proposing a new notion of security, which is focused on individuals rather than states. Kim Sung Won points out that human security contains a fundamental belief in the indivisibility of security and human rights in his article
“Human Security with an Asian Face?” Under the concept of human security, there can be no security for individuals if the right to life is threatened. Security would be also be lacking when individuals are denied the right to survive through the denial of food, clothing, or housing (Kim 2010).
The concept of human security suggests that the people-centered view of security is necessary for national, regional and global stability (HSI 2011). For example, Sadako Ogata, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) divided the concept into four key elements. The first essential element is the possibility for all citizens to live in peace and security within their own borders. The second element is that people should enjoy without discrimination all rights and obligations. The third element is social inclusion rather than social exclusion. The fourth element is that of the establishment of the rule of law and the independence of the justice system. These four basic elements are predicated on the equality of all
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before the law; effectively removing any risk of arbitrariness that so often manifests itself in discrimination, abuse or oppression (Ogata 1998).
The development of the concept of human security is a meaningful trend in the process of human history. The concept is acceptable to most people, and it is also birth and low infant mortality for a developing country.” They continued to argue that both North and South Korea “have achieved fairly low mortality and are characterized by similar patterns of cause of death” (Eberstadt and Banister 1992).
2-2 Food Security
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948, a milestone document in the history of human rights, mentions food security in Article 25.7 The World Food Summit of 1996 defined food security as “when all people at all times have access to sufficient, safe, nutritious food to maintain a healthy and active life.”
The concept of food security is commonly defined as including both physical and economic access to food that meets people’s dietary needs and food preferences (WHO N.d.).
7 Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) states that “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of
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The definition of food security provided by the UNDP is that “all people at all times have both physical and economic access to basic food.” This requires not just providing enough food but also requires that people have ready access to food – that they are “entitled” to food, by growing it for themselves, by buying it or by taking advantage of a public food distribution system (UNDP 1994). The concept of food security can be classified into three aspects: food availability, food access and food use. Food availability means having sufficient quantities of food available on a consistent basis. Having sufficient resources to obtain appropriate foods for a nutritious diet is “food access.” The term “food use” means appropriate use based on knowledge of basic nutrition and care as well as adequate water and sanitation (WFP 2012). Food security can serve as a measurement of ensured access to essential nutrition which refers to a household’s or country’s ability to provide future physical and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food that fulfills “the dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life (FAO 2006).”
Per Pinstrup-Andersen, a Danish economist and professor at Cornell University, argued that food security is related to whether a country can provide access to enough food for its own citizens or not, and this definition was agreed upon at the World Food Summit in 1996 (Pinstrup-Andersen 2009)8. In the article, “Food Security, Population and Environment,” the authors concluded that food security is of the utmost importance because it is causing serious international problems related to global trade, the global environment, famine, and the mass migrations that can be triggered by regional food scarcity (Ehrlich et al. 1993).
8 Food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for a healthy and active life.
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Two broader studies of the DPRK are Robert L. Worden’s 2008 North Korea:
A Country Study and Victor Cha’s 2012 study, The Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future. The former book is an edited volume of experts on Korean studies.
David Kang, a professor at University of Southern California, reviewed the North Korean famine of 1995–1998 and concluded that the famine was a “result of both systemic and proximate causes” including the loss of China and the Soviet Union as major subsidy providers, massive summer floods in 1995, and a chronic shortage of energy resources (Kang 2008).
The economic situation pushed many North Koreans to leave their country temporarily to search for food and also to ultimately resettle in South Korea or other countries (Selinger 2004). William Moon compares the number of deaths during the North Korean famine (0.22 Million to 3.5 Million) with the Great Leap Forward in the People’s Republic of China’s (from 14 million to 40 million deaths), India’s Great Bengal famine in the 1940s (between 1.5 million and 3 million) and the Irish famine (1 million people). He describes the famine as one of the greatest human tragedies of our time and food insecurity in North Korea as related to issues of both food production and governance structure. Famine, under the situation of global food abundance, is a by-product of nature and human behavior (Moon 2009).
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Figure 2-1. Number of the DPRK Defectors Entering South Korea, 1998-2013
Source: Ministry of Unification, South Korea, “Number of North Korean Refugees Entered the South,”
http://eng.unikorea.go.kr/index.do?menuCd=DOM_000000204003000000 (accessed July 1, 2014)
Figure 2-1 shows that the number of defectors arriving in South Korea increased in the years before 2010. Several reasons for this include the famine and the North Korean government policy toward defectors. The DPRK authorities treated an attempted border crossing as a serious political crime. However, since the beginning of the Great Famine around 1996, North Korean authorities have dramatically softened their policy toward fugitives, because of their large numbers and the obvious lack of political motivation behind their behavior. Illegal border crossings were later treated as a relatively minor offense, even if the authorities did not recognize this openly (Lankov 2004). On the other hand, the number of North Korean defectors in China, according to the official Chinese estimate, was 10,000, but the real figure is several times larger than that number. It is possible that there were as many as 200,000 at the peak of the famine (Seymour 2005).
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voluntarily, others are forced to leave or flee as a matter of life or death. “Push” and“pull” factors are terms used to explain why people move. Despite limited access to information, it is clear that two key elements driving North Koreans to cross the borders into China, including deterioration of humanitarian conditions mainly due to food shortages and human rights violations (Margesson et al. 2007). This thesis will only focus on the food shortage issue.
The collapse of the Soviet Union and socialist state economy in the 1990s brought down the public distribution system (PDS), the national system for allocating food supplies in the DPRK. Food supplies to less politically favored regions and sections of society were cut first. The resulting famine killed up to one million people in the mid to late 1990s, making it one of the worst famines of the 20th Century (LiNK N.d.-b). Disastrous floods in the summer of 1995 plunged North Korea into a severe famine that, by some estimates, caused 600,000 to two million deaths, approximately 2 to 8 percent of North Korea’s population. Extreme poverty within the DPRK in general, and food shortages in particular, appear to have a significant impact on movement across the border into China (Margesson et al. 2007).
North Korea’s failed agricultural policies and susceptibility to adverse climate conditions, compounded by “environmental mismanagement, and an inability to purchase necessary agricultural inputs or food imports[,] mean that North Korea has had chronic food shortages” ever since the famine (LiNK N.d.-b). Some argue that food shortages are closely linked to the regime itself, in part because the PDS favors the ruling elite and the military and is tied to the government’s ongoing broader political and military motivations (Margesson et al. 2007). This has left an entire
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generation of North Koreans with stunted growth and higher susceptibility to health problems (LiNK N.d.-b).
2-3 Foreign Food Aid
In the twentieth century, North Korea experienced several major famines.
These occurred in the mid-1940s, 1950s, early 1970s and 1990s (Cha 2012). The real problem began with the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War. In 1987, the Soviet Union began to cut off all forms of aid to, trade with and investment in the DPRK. North Korea was so critically dependent on the aid from the Soviet Union that it faced immediate adverse impacts on its ability to maintain sufficient levels of agricultural production (Cha 2012). From 1994 to 1998, North Korea experienced a great famine that caused 600,000 and 1,000,000 people deaths from starvation or hunger-related illnesses, with deaths peaking in 1997 with around 4 percent of total population (Cha 2012). These great tragedies aroused international attention to the food security issue in North Korea followed by international humanitarian assistance. There is no perfectly correct statistic data about exactly how many people died during the famine in North Korea in 1990’s. The data provides above shows the difference sources from Professor Cha and Professor Margesson, and the NGOs’ reports. Therefore, the numbers written here is not going to prove which one is the correct one but shows the whole picture about the closest fact about the famine in North Korea.
In the article “A Primer on Foreign Aid,” Steven Radelet lists four broad economic and development goals that most foreign aid is intended to achieve.
Through building infrastructure, supporting productive sectors, or bringing in new
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ideas and technologies, foreign aid aims (1) to stimulate local economic growth; (2) to strengthen health, education, political, or environmental systems; (3) to support subsistence consumption of food, especially during relief operations or humanitarian crises; or (4) to help stabilize an economy following economic shocks (Radelet 2006).
The value of international food aid is shown in an article, “From Food Aid to Food Security: the Case of the Safety Net Policy in Ethiopia”. The Ethiopian Productive Safety Net Programme provided food aid and food-for-work for 5 million regularly food-insecure people in Ethiopia in order to achieve a greater level of food security.
There is no doubt that many people in Ethiopia are alive today due to the contribution of food aid (Bishop and Hilhorst 2010).
The causes of the North Korea famine are many, but they mainly revolve around misguided government policy in Pyongyang. In 1995 and 1996, North Korea experienced flooding on a biblical scale and the food shortage became more acute. At the same time, the number of defectors swimming across the river to China and the infant mortality rate began to skyrocket (Cha 2012). A quarter of the infant mortality at that time was due to the lack of food and the extremely poor living conditions. The motivations of defectors who crossed the border to China were mainly due to the survival difficulty rather than criticism toward the regime or being afraid of punishment from government (Kim 2005). During the serious food shortage in North Korea, Kim Jong-Il still decided to spend 25 percent of GDP on military construction and development. Moreover, in 1996, the DPRK depended heavily on international food aid while diversifying its own resources into other non-food related programs (Cha 2012).
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The North Korean regime was sanctioned by the United Nations because of its nuclear program, but its people are innocent and should be entitled to food security (UNSCR N.d.). North Korea is the only East Asian country on the global list of 22 low-income food-deficit countries in the FAO Food Security Assessment Report (FAO 2010). Defeating hunger in the world is the goal of the FAO, which helps needy countries to improve agriculture, forestry and fishery practices, ensure good nutrition and food security for all (FAO N.d.-b).
The scale of the international assistance to North Korea, from both governmental and non-governmental organizations, increased from US$39 million in 1997 to US$416 million in 2007 (MOU N.d.-a). Although many international organizations offered food and financial aid to North, the food security situation today is still not encouraging. The people of North Korea have unceasingly borne the brunt of the regime’s human rights abuses, and the “right to food” is one of the most basic and important issues (Cha 2012).
One study in the DPRK in 2011 was organized by FAO/WFP Crop and Food Security Assessment Mission (CFSAM), which was requested by the DPRK Government in October 2011 in order to assess the 2011 main-crop harvest, to forecast the 2012 production of winter and spring crops, to estimate cereal import requirements for the 2011/12 marketing year, and to assess the household food security situation and estimate food aid needs (FAO and WFP 2012). A delegation was sent by the FAO to conduct a large geographic area field study in North Korea.
Mission members represented a wide variety of skills and perspectives on agriculture and food security. Korean speaking international staff from WFP accompanied the
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teams in the field (FAO and WFP 2012). The invitation from Kim Jong-Il indicated that he had understood the necessity of having international food aid to save his country from further human tragedies.
Figure 2-2. Rice Production in the DPRK (Unit: tons), 1990-2012
Source: “Food Supply Quantity in Selected Country (DPRK), FAOSTAT, 1990-2012,”
http://faostat3.fao.org/faostat-gateway/go/to/download/Q/QC/E (accessed July 1, 2014)
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Figure 2-3. Total Estimated Food Aid to North Korea, 1995-2012
Source: World Food Program’s International food Aid Information System (INTERFAIS) database.
http://www.wfp.org/fais/ (accessed October 1, 2013)
The above charts show quantities of food support from the FAO from 1992 to 2009 with an average of 3.5 million metric tons annually. The FAO assistance was evaluated regularly and was not affected by the political or military developments in the Korean Peninsula, such as the inter-Koreas summits of 2000 and 2007, DPRK’s nuclear testing in 2006 and 2009, or constant military tensions. Contrary to Juche, or the spirit of self-reliance, the North Korean government was greatly dependent on the large-scale food aid from the IGOs. North Korea is the third-greatest recipient of food
The above charts show quantities of food support from the FAO from 1992 to 2009 with an average of 3.5 million metric tons annually. The FAO assistance was evaluated regularly and was not affected by the political or military developments in the Korean Peninsula, such as the inter-Koreas summits of 2000 and 2007, DPRK’s nuclear testing in 2006 and 2009, or constant military tensions. Contrary to Juche, or the spirit of self-reliance, the North Korean government was greatly dependent on the large-scale food aid from the IGOs. North Korea is the third-greatest recipient of food