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Stardate
20020210.0633 (On Screen): North Korea's economy has been a basket case for years. A combination of drought and mismanagement has meant that the nation has been unable to even come close to being agriculturally self-sufficient, and it has been kept going by massive importation of food, especially from the US. In fact, the US has been one of the biggest donor nations for a long time keeping North Korea from complete collapse. Which is ironic.
I wonder if that will continue. There was the designation of North Korea as being part of the "axis of evil", which surely indicates that any patience that the US has for the Kim regime is over.
The UN's World Food Program is appealing for help with respect to North Korea. There is an expected shortfall of 1.5 million tons of grain and the WFP expected to supply about half of that at a cost of $216 million, but donations have dried up and it may not be able to. In hopes of motivating donors, they stress that children are at risk. (Food aid agencies always use pictures of children in these situations.)
Unfortunately, it isn't clear that sending food to North Korea actually will help the starving there. There's good reason to believe that prior food aid was being diverted by the government, who was not delivering it to the starving in the countryside. If the only result of food aid has actually been to prop up a despotic government, are we actually harming the people of North Korea more than helping them with it, in the long run? How can we help the people of a nation when their own government doesn't care about them and sees political advantage in letting them starve?
Update: Megan McArdle comments, and says that she isn't sure what to do. And indeed the point she raises is the fundamental question raised in all war: Is it better to kill X number of people now, or by inaction to let X*5 people die in the future? No-one wants to face questions like that, because both choices suck. What we'd really like is to find a solution where no-one has to die at all. But the real world forces us to face these kinds of things, and we can't escape them by sticking our heads in the sand. Refusing to make a choice is a choice, and it's a choice for the X*5 deaths. If our redirected food aid is propping up the Kim regime, then the blood of those dying there now of starvation is already on our hands, as will those who starve next year and the year after.
An active blockade is out of the question; it isn't politically possible. But refusing to donate food is a different matter, and it may well be that it is something we should consider. In years past, most of that food from the WFP was donated by the US. Perhaps it is time to stop that.
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