When assessing the impact of the mid-1990s famine on the North Korean population, experts have been working on an assumption: that North Koreans living in the country’s breadbasket provinces were relatively better nourished than those in other provinces. Though a reasonable premise, Hazel Smith, professor of international relations at Warwick University and author of Hungry for Peace: International Security, Humanitarian Assistance and Social Change in North Korea, has researched reams of data and found that the variable impact of the famine on North Koreans had less to do with the agricultural production of their province than with its economic fluidity.
Outlining the results of her research at The Korea Society, Smith explained that as food shortages became critical, the government’s public food distribution system collapsed and the population turned to informal, and previously illegal, market mechanisms to feed itself. Local markets sprang up across the country, developing more fully in some provinces than others. North Koreans who lived in provinces with well developed market structures ate better than those who didn’t.
The provinces that harvested the most food weren’t automatically the ones with the most developed markets. Smith cited the example of South Hwanghae. Though one of the country’s most agriculturally productive provinces, its marketization process faced obstacles. Close to Pyongyang, it was easy for central government authorities who opposed market systems to impose their authority in South Hwanghae. Geography was another important factor. Whereas the populations of provinces close to the border had opportunities to mix with Chinese merchants and jump start provincial commerce, South Hwanghae was far from the border and thus isolated. As a result, South Hwanghae residents suffered the most severe malnutrition in the country.
This pattern, of provinces with greater access to foreigners (and their hard currency) as well as greater openness to market mechanisms surviving the famine better, was consistent throughout the nationwide data.
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
North Korea: Market Opportunity, Poverty and the Provinces
with
Hazel Smith
Professor of International Relations, University of Warwick
Original Announcement:
During and after the famine of the mid-1990s, in the absence of state capacity, local administrative units and workplaces in the DPRK improvised, using their own resources, political, and historical relationships as well as a principle of self-reliance inherited from the long-gone socialist period. Hazel Smith will explain how physical, social and political capitals intersected with market opportunities, thus providing a framework for understanding the various survival opportunities and reconstruction paths that became available for different social groups. This explanatory framework functions to explain inequality for all social groups in the post-famine DPRK, whether defined by age, gender, occupation or regional provenance. In this presentation, she will focus on geographical location and use the province as the main unit of analysis.
