Monday, May 11, 2026
News and Views from the Global South
North Korea Hungry for Aid
- The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) lived through a famine that killed, at conservative estimates, nearly a million people in the 1990s, and is now nearing the brink of a second food disaster, according to an extensive study conducted this year by the United Nations World Food Program (WFP).
Not everyone is prepared to be so forgiving towards what many perceive to be an unyielding government in Pyongyang. In late February this year, the Washington Post reported that 15 years and two billion dollars worth of aid later, one in four pregnant mothers is undernourished, while one in three children is stunted.
Lack of transparency in the food distribution process, and a virtual absence of tangible 'returns' on aid, prompted Republican Senator Richard Lugar of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to proclaim back in February, "it is essential that U.S. assistance is actually received by the hungry North Korean children and mothers rather than reinforce the… military whose care is already a priority over the rest of the population."
Such doubts could lead to underestimating the crisis – which some experts, such as deputy director of the Peterson Institute Marcus Noland, suggest is being exaggerated by the government in order to hoard grain for hardships yet to come – and thus not responding with sufficient speed or urgency.
Christopher Hill, former chief U.S. negotiator for North Korea, went so far as to write last month that South Korea faces "one of the toughest choices a government can face: whether the short-term cost in human lives is worth the potential long-term benefits… that a famine- induced collapse of North Korea could bring."
The findings, released late March in the Rapid Food Security Assessment (RFSA) report, were dismal: 3.5 million people currently exist in states of severe malnutrition and the dwindling food supplies are slated to run completely dry by the end of year, essentially condemning well over 15 percent of North Korea’s population of 22 million to starvation.
“We face a critical window to get supplies into the country and reach the millions who are already hungry,” WFP Deputy Executive Director and Chief Operating Officer Amir Abdulla said last week. “Our primary concern is for those who are most vulnerable to shocks in the food supply – children, mothers, the elderly and large families.”
Government rations are at an all-time low, the report warned, currently supplying no more than half of people’s daily nutritional needs. Families receiving rations – 68 percent of the population, according to the WFP’s 2010 Crop and Food Security Assessment Mission (CFSAM) report – are cutting food intake down to skeletal levels, a reminder of the “Let’s Eat Two Meals a Day” campaign after heavy flooding in the 1990s forced the government to cut rations by 50 percent.
Meanwhile, North Korea has faced its most bitterly cold winter in six years. Crop loss, combined with DPRK’s inability to acquire adequate cereal imports, as well as an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease – which has so far infected more than 10,000 oxen, milk cows and pigs, according to state-run media reports – have pushed DPRK to the precipice of another humanitarian tragedy.
Politics impede food aid
The generosity of donor countries has waxed and waned over the last three decades, largely in response to Jong-il’s isolationist policies, his stockpiling of nuclear weapons and deep scepticism on the part of aid donors that the supplies sent into the cordoned-off country actually reach the mouths they were intended for.
Two years ago, the United States was North Korea’s primary food donor, supplying 170,000 tonnes between 2008 and 2009. At the time, this was still below the WFP’s projection that at least 305,000 tonnes were required to keep nutrition rates at a bare minimum by 2010.
In the last two years, however, both the United States and South Korea – whose donations sometimes hit the half-million mark annually – terminated their aid programmes, adding significant strain to an already-depleted food supply. China remains a lead donor of food aid to the DPRK.
Discussing the question ‘To Give or Not to Give’ at the United States Institute for Peace (USIP) in Washington Thursday, Andrew Natsios, former chief administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), said that the debate over food aid to DPRK was too often compounded by discussions of disarmament and arguments about foreign policy in the “most policed state in the history of the world”.
“But if you take the argument that you cannot help a people whose government you disagree with,” Natsios said, “the U.S. wouldn’t be supplying food to any country in the world, and certainly not to places like Sudan where we are currently engaged in a huge food donation programme.”
Reminding everyone that former U.S. president Herbert Hoover donated 60 million tonnes of food to the Soviet Union between 1921 and 1923, Natsios added, “We have to help the people without enabling authoritarian regimes to survive.”Venerable Pomnyum Sunim, a respected Buddhist monk and human rights activist, added, “In a complicated situation like this, we have to root ourselves firmly in the old principles of humanitarian aid and ask the simple question: what do we need to do for the people, and how are we going to do it?”
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