North Korea food crisis prompts lifting of restrictions on private markets

To battle the problem of starvation in North Korea, the government is allowing local markets to stay open longer and sell food without restrictions.

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Mr. Choi says shortages have been getting worse since last December as North Korea suffered under the cutoff of hundreds of thousands of tons of food and fertilizer that South Korea had been providing for ten years before the conservative Lee Myung-bak was inaugurated as president in February 2008. North Korea also is suffering, he believes, from Mr. Lee’s cancellation last month of all trade with North Korea in retaliation for the sinking of the South Korean navy corvette the Cheonan in March.

A laissez-faire opening

“The government is more tolerant of the markets,” says Ha Tae Keung, president of Open Radio for North Korea, which broadcast two hours a day of news and views into the North by short wave from Seoul, “They haven’t had enough food for ten years.”

Mr. Ha says, however, that private markets are springing up as word spreads that authorities will not try to close them down rather than in response to a specific directive. “It’s not legal, but it’s permission in practice,” he says.

On the basis of surreptitious calls by cell phone from informants inside North Korea, Ha says state companies are forced to set up farms to feed their workers. “Each company has its own farm,” he says. “The factory distributes part of the farmland to workers.”

In general, says Ha, a privileged layer of people living in Pyongyang, the capital, “are still getting food distribution from the government” while those living elsewhere are left to fend for themselves.

Those conditions appear to lie behind instructions cited by the Good Friends report in which security officials are told not to “confiscate commodities from merchants nor make any unreasonable demand on the pretext of regulations.” Otherwise, says the Good Friends report, “people will starve to death one after another if commerce is banned where the national food situation is extremely fragile.”

Those conditions, says Choi Jin-wook, help to account for the ferocity with which the North Korean propaganda regime has promised “punishment” if the United Nations condemns the North for the sinking of the Cheonan. He believes that North Korea, which has denied anything to do with the explosion in which 46 sailors were killed, wants to foment trouble in order to intimidate South Korea – and obtain more aid.

“If they make too hard a provocation, it is the end of North Korea,” says Choi. “They will make a certain level of provocation in order to blackmail South Korea.”