For a long time, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea or DPRK
has been trying to make itself self-sufficient in food production.
Something we might take for granted in other countries, is very hard for this one.
Reliable information about the country is hard to come by. The
government's official channels are not exactly super credible
and so people mostly rely on anecdotes or rumors. But we are going to do our best.
In this video, we are going to parse what we know about the DPRK or North Korea
(I will use the two names interchangeably),
their agricultural instability, and what the government is doing about it.
Historically, Korea's north was its industrial heartland. The south, its breadbasket.
The geography reflects this specialization. 80%
of North Korea's land is composed of mountains and uplands with deep valleys in between.
The majority of the country's 25 million people
live on the coastal plans and lowlands of the west.
About 15% of the country's land is arable. It does not sound like a lot,
but plenty of countries can feed their people with less.
The global average of arable land per country for instance is 10%.
And in case you are curious, Taiwan’s arable land percentage is about 17%.
Most of North Korea's farms are located on the country's west coast, where the land,
weather, and growing seasons are more favorable.
The cropping season is generally short. The weather can get quite harsh during
the winter especially in the mountains. And the summers are short, hot, humid and rainy.
About 60% of the DPRK's rain comes between June and September. The remaining 40% is
widely distributed and sporadic, which leaves the country vulnerable to droughts and floods.
These extreme climate events are worsened by inadequate infrastructure
and deforestation as we will discuss later.
At the founding of the DPRK, the Workers' Party of Korea or WPK inherited from the
Japanese occupation government an advanced industrialized society.
Even taking into account the damage sustained during World War II, North Korea held 72% of
the peninsula's industrial capacity and over 90% of its hydroelectric capacity.
Much of this was seized by the ruling WPK regime. Land belonging to Korean landlords and Japanese
colonialists was also seized and redistributed to the peasantry throughout 1945 and 1946.
This might be considered a land reform situation. In previous videos, I have talked a little about
Post-War land reforms in Taiwan and Japan as well as how they might unlock untapped
agricultural capacity and wealth for society. This perhaps could have happened in the DPRK as well.
But then the Korean War happened. The three-year conflict ravaged the peninsula,
caused immense population upheaval, and annihilated its industrial infrastructure.
We will never know the true extent of the damage, but it was probably pretty bad.
After the fighting stopped, the DPRK looked to its two major Communist
neighbors - China and the Soviet Union - for aid and guidance on the rebuild.
Sino-Soviet relations at the time were rapidly deteriorating, and the North Koreans leveraged
this situation to extract the maximum possible concessions from the two. I have done a few
videos about this in previous times. This created a DPRK with selected influences from both giants.
Domestically, the DPRK patterned its economy after the Soviet Union. They created an
orthodox, centrally planned economy with the goal of suppressing markets.
The state owned every business and provided every job.
The state then seized all the land and established two types of farms:
Cooperatives and state farms. Farmers can only work on these two - not on their own private
plots. The state owned all the food grown on those lands and confiscated it for distribution.
Eternal Leader Kim Il-Sung pushed for this collectivization to make the DPRK self-reliant in
food production. It was in line with the country's official state ideology, which emphasizes
political independence and self-reliance. It also increased North Korea's distance from the Soviet
Union - which at the time was advocating for a very tight economic relationship.
The collectivization drive - criticized even by its Communist Bloc peers - would lead to
food shortages in the mid-1950s. In response, the North Korean government heavily pushed the use of
fertilizers, pesticides, tractors and irrigation systems. Yields stabilized, but left the North
Korean agricultural sector dangerously dependent on certain raw inputs like oil.
Over the years, North Korea accumulated vast
debts to their major benefactors - the Soviet Union and China. These
unpaid debts eventually led to the Soviets withdrawing a variety of subsidies in 1987.
That same year, the DPRK instituted a range of new agricultural "reforms".
They doubled down on double cropping and fertilizers. To expand their total arable
land, they razed forests, reclaimed tidal land and cleared hillsides.
It seems the intention was to compensate for the loss of Soviet aid.
But such intense practices led to soil depletion and acidification.
And the new land they cleared and reclaimed was, at best, marginal.
Thus food output still fell short of what was needed.
The collapse of the Soviet Union caused the North Koreans to lose their main source of coal,
oil and steel. The Soviets had provided as much as two-thirds of their two-way trade. The loss of oil
in particular affected their ability to produce fertilizers and run irrigation infrastructure.
The DPRK turned to China to compensate. By 1993 the Chinese nation provided North Korea with
77% of its fuel and 68% of its food. But in 1994, China began experiencing grain issues of its own.
They soon became disillusioned with its North Korea relations and cut back on this trade.
In response, the North Koreans called the Chinese "traitors to the socialist cause".
That same year, North Korean radio broadcasts began admitting the existence of hunger
while simultaneously denying its seriousness.
We do not know when exactly the famine began. But studies of North Korean mortality rates during
this time in 1993 imply that certain provinces had already begun experiencing famine conditions.
In 1993, rations were delayed or temporarily suspended in certain provinces. Then in 1994,
the government started triage, entirely ending food shipments to four provinces.
A year later in 1995, they began coercive seizures of grain from the farms
and established prison camps for those caught foraging for food. Refugees from
certain hard hit provinces began pouring into China, leading to horrific media reports.
That same year - 1995, and 1996 to a smaller extent - the country's four
western provinces - where most of its farms are located - experienced
flooding. The waters collapsed terraces and silted fields.
The North Korean government claimed that 5 million people were displaced,
over a million tons of grain were lost, and an estimated $15 billion of damages occurred.
No doubt the floods were pretty bad. But it's likely the government exaggerated the extent of
the damage. Food shortages existed long before the floods began. And the numbers did not always match
up. For instance, a UN survey could only count 500,000 displaced people, rather than 5 million.
Playing up the damage from the floods and subsequent droughts allowed the government
to save face while requesting aid from South Korea or Japan. Simultaneously,
it deflected outside criticism of the political regime and its governance.
This international food aid helped, for sure, but not all of it ended up
in the hands and mouths of those North Koreans most in need of it.
Many charitable organizations eventually pulled out of North Korea
due to disputes and a lack of accountability.
This was and continues to be a contentious debate with regards to North Korean relations.
To sum it all up, we know that a famine of some sort occurred in the DPRK
throughout the 1990s. And that it was pretty bad. But how bad it was,
how many people died, and even when it actually started and ended remains uncertain.
Death estimates range from 220,000 to 3.5 million. Best guesses are probably somewhere in between.
The country's agricultural production has improved in the years since the 1990s.
This is due to a combination of international aid, favorable weather, and economic reforms.
But North Korean farmers continue to face a number of crop growing challenges.
Much of what we know today about the DPRK's agricultural situation
comes from international aid programs which have been operating in the country since at least 2011.
Their information is as reliable as anything you can say about the country,
but remains subject to interference from North Korean institutions.
After the famine, the government finally allowed households to own and cultivate
their own private plots. People grow potatoes, corn, and vegetables on these small gardens.
Since they are privately owned, they tend to be well cared for and have played a large part
in improving the country's food security.
In 2012, the Kim Jong-Eun government made certain
economic policy changes to devolve more authority to the lower levels.
Now, actual workers on the collective farms can make more of their own decisions - material and
investment planning, for instance - rather than just blindly following Party orders.
This is nothing like how Deng Xiaoping reformed China's agricultural practices.
But it is a step forward for sure.
DPRK propaganda proclaim that these reforms have given flexibility to farmers to be creative.
But as with everything in North Korea, we do not know the extent these reforms have
been implemented as well as whether they are actually impacting the bottom line statistics.
One of North Korea's biggest agricultural concerns is its deteriorating soil quality.
Generally, modern conservation agriculture advocates for diversified crop rotations,
permanent organic soil cover, and minimum soil disturbance.
North Korean farmers very aggressively plough and till their soil.
They also blast it with a lot of chemical fertilizers, which as I mentioned before,
has caused the soil to turn acidic. This interferes with the soils' ability to
absorb air and water as well as the plants' ability to take up nutrients.
North Korean Farmers also very aggressively double-crop, which means to plant several
crops in the same area or same crop year. For instance, a double crop of potatoes.
A big crop in the spring and then another in the winter.
Barley is a primary spring crop, but it is also grown throughout the winter in smaller quantities.
Such aggressive double cropping year after year has deteriorated the land’s capacity to cultivate
food. North Korea's soils have a reddish hue due to a lack of organic matter. In 2011,
the average yields of paddy rice was 3.9 tons per hectare, way down from the 8.0 of the 1980s.
In order to preserve the soil quality,
farmers should probably rotate in a few legumes from time to time.
Cultivating legumes can improve several aspects of soil fertility.
They increase the amount of soil nitrogen, soil water retention,
and more. Wheat yields are higher when following a batch of legume harvests than wheat.
However, North Korean farmers are reluctant to implement these legume-based cropping schemes due
to fear of not being able to meet wheat production goals set by the government. I don’t blame them.
That situation is unlikely to change so long as goals and plans are set by edict from above.
The DPRK’s farmers have long lacked adequate farming technology
like tractors suited for the country's smaller and irregularly shaped fields.
Just as often, they are unable to run or maintain that technology due to shortages of energy or
parts. This prevents farmers from maximizing their efforts.
Donations help, but a big reason for this situation has to do with
the country’s inability to raise funds to purchase these items.
Those within the DPRK assign the blame for this to the United States, pointing
to American trade sanctions like the Export Control Act and the Trading with the Enemy Act.
I want to note the former passed in 1940 and the latter, 1917. Long before North Korea existed
as a state. And North Korea was removed from Trading with the Enemy Act restrictions in 2008.
I would also be remiss to remind viewers that both China and the Soviet Union - hardly
American lackeys - withdrew support and aid to the DPRK on their own accord.
The country is a notorious deadbeat.
Over the past few decades, the North Korean government has intensively exerted to expand
its overall arable land. But the best land has already been cultivated. So much of
these efforts involve cutting down trees on the hillsides to make way for terraces.
During the Great Famine, the government allowed lands with slopes above 15
degrees to be cultivated. The soils on these lands are pretty poor quality.
Despite this, satellite imagery shows that one million hectares
of land on slopes over 10 degrees have been cleared to grow cereals.
As I mentioned, much of the country is mountainous. The area's weather
is also prone to unpredictable periods of rainfall. Without trees to hold down the soil,
big rainstorms can very easily wash it down and create rivers of silt.
Not only do these damage the soil's growing capacity, they
make floods more dangerous to people and property.
Floods have been noticeably more destructive since the 1980s when these deforestation efforts began.
And they also affect the population's ability to generate energy to sustain themselves.
77% of the rural population and 28% of the urban population rely on wood for cooking.
The work of Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen notes that famines
happen not only because food crops fail but also because food distribution networks collapse.
During the DPRK's central planning era, the state collected all the farms' harvests and
distributed them to the population. Every household received food rations. How big
those rations were was determined by occupation and household size.
During the Great Famine, even when food was available, oil shortages made distributing
that food difficult. That old food rationing system collapsed and ordinary North Koreans
resorted to illegal private markets for access to food.
When you hear the words "black markets", you might think of gangster tough guys from
the movies and what not. But North Korea's “black markets” are generally run by women.
They are mostly just housewives making and selling stuff to keep their families alive.
After the famine subsided, the North Korean government at first attempted to crack
down on these markets. But after a long and bumpy while
they formalized them - providing them with housing facilities and even security.
The government refused to call it “market reform” but that’s essentially what it was.
Today, defector surveys say that most ordinary North Koreans
get their food from these markets as well as the private plots that I mentioned earlier.
The government has also attempted to revitalize the old food rations system.
But to what extent it now exists is hard to tell.
On one hand, defectors say they no longer receive food rations from it like back in the Old Days.
But we also know that the state is still taking up to 70% of state farmers' annual harvests
for distribution. So I reckon that those rations are only going to the
country's political and economic elites to retain their support of the regime.
The North Korean government has seen its budget and resources vastly depleted over the years.
They are trying to do all of this reform with an official government budget of something like
$3.3 billion USD (a 2007 figure) and a nominal 2017 GDP of $30 billion USD.
Kim Jong-Eun clearly considers the reform and revitalization of the country's agricultural
sector a core aspect of his policy. He has repeatedly said in speeches
that he wants the country to focus on improving people's lives through increased food production.
But his government has been rather short on putting forth concrete policy solutions
for making this improvement. Most of the things he says are vague - like
a "seed revolution" - or more of the same - like "Double cropping".
While distribution has indeed improved and famine is no longer a major threat, the situation still
falls short of self sufficiency. The country’s farms have suffered real abuse and soil damage
over the decades and these proposals are not going to help. The fundamental agricultural
situation needs to change before North Korea's people can start seeing enough food on the table.
Alright that's it for tonight. Thanks for watching. If you enjoyed the video,
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