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We have been following developments in the Horn of Africa, and they have implications both for the study of famine and for policy with respect to North Korea.
The Center for Global Development has a very good blogpost by Jake Glover that underlines the obvious importance of political factors in the extent of famine. Preliminary analysis suggests that drought may be a necessary but by no means sufficient determinant of the famine in the Horn of Africa. The evidence? Conditions in Ethiopia—hardly a liberal democracy—are superior to those in Southern Somalia right across the border.
The differences between North and South Korea are now so large that we forget that such comparisons make the same point on the peninsula: rains and floods which are devastating in North Korea have nowhere near the same material impact in the South. In short, politics matters, a point that motivated our book Famine in North Korea. Charles Kenny makes this point in Foreign Policy as does Owen Barder in a thoughful blog.
But the issue cuts deeper and goes to the question of how to allocate aid across countries in need. In an excellent policy brief for the Peterson Institute, Cullen Hendrix provides the international context facing the humanitarian community. It is not pretty. As of late 2010, four short years of rising world food prices and the global economic downturn increased the ranks of the world’s food insecure from roughly 850 to 925 million, reversing decades of slow yet steady progress in reducing hunger. And that was before the current round of self-imposed economic woes in both Europe and the US.
In this context, there are lots of claimants on a limited supply of aid. Although we have made a reasoned case for aid, it is also necessary to prioritize areas that are both in worse shape than North Korea and that provide better prospects of having the intended effect. The warlord-controlled areas of Somalia present problems that are surprisingly similar to those in North Korea: political authorities that are not concerned with the fate of their people. In these cases, you do what you can. But there is a reasonable moral argument that faced with two equivalent shortage settings, you should give where you are likely to have the most effect.
Put differently, North Korea has obligations too. And the extreme violation of those obligations—the “failure to protect” in current humanitarian parlance—should rightly be viewed as a crime. Charles Kenny makes the point in his article cited above. A more extended legal case is made in an excellent essay by David Marcus for the American Journal of International Law called “Famine Crimes in International Law” (a .pdf is available online by just Googling it).
