The Two Koreas_ A Contemporary History - Don Oberdorfer [209]
Because the United Nations agencies and other aid-givers had no confidence that aid they sent would reach the country's people, they demanded and obtained access to flood-stricken parts of the North Korean countryside as a condition of providing assistance. This trailblazing access to some previously inaccessible areas was troubling to the secretive DPRK military and security forces, but they had no other choice than to accept it.
Trevor Page, chief of the newly opened UN World Food Program office in Pyongyang, visited the Korean hinterland late in 1995 and found malnutrition rampant and hungry people nearly everywhere. In the western province of Huanghei, Page observed "people scavenging in the fields looking for roots and wild plants to prepare soup for their families. People were anxious, restless. They are not getting enough to eat." Further south near the demilitarized zone, in one of the country's prime food-producing areas, Page found "not a cabbage to be seen" after authorities reduced the already-minimal food ration under the Public Distribution System to the bare subsistence level: a bowl or two of rice or corn per person per day. Even that was uncertain due to frequent supply failures.
Based on a visit to farming areas, cities, and DPRK government agencies in early December, a team of experts from the UN's Food and Agricultural Organization and its World Food Program reported that the floods "were extremely serious and caused extensive damage to agriculture and infrastructure." The experts also reported, however, that "the floods made an already and rapidly deteriorating food supply situation much worse, rather than caused the situation in the first place."
The DPRK had been historically able to till only about one-fifth of its mountainous territory and that usually for only one crop annually, since much of the northern land was frost free only six months of the year. In addition, overuse of chemical fertilizers in desperate pursuit of higher yields, failure to rotate crops, and short-sighted denuding of hillsides that accelerated erosion had all severely affected the country's capacity to grow sufficient food.
In the past, Pyongyang had coped with dwindling harvests by importing large amounts of grain under subsidized terms from its communist allies. Such imports were no longer possible when the Soviet Union collapsed and China, whose domestic consumption was rising in a swiftly growing economy, became a grain importer itself and began demanding hard cash for exports to Pyongyang. Despite its need to make up for massive shortfalls of more than 2 million tons of grain in both 1994 and 1995, North Korea lacked the foreign currency or access to credit to do more than very modest buying on international markets.
Long before the floods began, North Korea had been quietly asking selected countries for help in dealing with its food shortage. In the early 1990s, according to the then-director of the ROK intelligence agency, Suh Dong Kwon, the North requested 500,000 tons of rice from the South on condition that it be supplied secretly. The idea was dropped after Seoul responded that in its increasingly open society, it would be impossible to hide the rice shipments to the North. After a skimpy harvest in 1992, the regime began to propagandize to the public "Let's Eat Two Meals a Day," a program of austerity. Later, during the 1994 Geneva negotiations with the United States, DPRK officials had spoken with urgency of their severe food problems, but the U.S. team was so fixed on nuclear issues that the comments made little impression.
A more extensive effort began in January 1995, when Pyongyang appealed to Japan and South Korea for emergency food. Japan agreed to supply 500,000 tons. On June 21, after semiofficial NorthSouth talks on the issue were held in Beijing, the ROK government announced it would donate 150,000 tons of rice to the North in unmarked bags "in a spirit of reconciliation and cooperation." President Kim Young Sam enthusiastically declared that the government would purchase the grain on international