Mission Highlights
- This FAO/WFP Crop and Food Supply Assessment Mission was the first one to be conducted since 2004; however, it benefited from recent exercises, including the August 2007 Flood Rapid Assessment, and the 2008 joint FAO/WFP Rapid Food Security Assessment.
- The findings forecast a total domestic food production for the 2008/09 marketing year of 3.342 million tonnes milled (4.21 million tonnes unmilled), including potatoes in cereal equivalent and production from kitchen gardens and sloping lands.
- This represents a decline in food production for the third consecutive year.
- The total cereal import requirement in 2008/09 is estimated at 1.786 million tonnes, based on a cereal utilization of 167 kg/capita/year and taking into account non-human utilization (seeds, feed, losses etc). Even assuming commercial imports are maintained at the substantial levels of previous years (500 000 tonnes) and that all current food aid pledges (450 000 tonnes, including unconfirmed contributions) are delivered, the country would face a remaining deficit of 836 000 tonnes.
- Analysis of household food access has revealed that most households will face major challenges in meeting their food consumption requirements during 2008/09. This is due to overall low per capita cereal availability in most provinces; low and sharp seasonal reductions in Public Distribution System rations (150 grams per person per day as reported from June to September 2008); reduced number of meals and poor dietary diversity at the household level; and limited alternative options for accessing food.
- It is estimated that some 8.741 million persons (37 percent of the total population) consisting of the elderly; pregnant and lactating women; children in nursery, kindergarten and primary schools; children in residential institutions and in paediatric wards; and other transitory categories will require food assistance to meet their basic food needs.
- Based on the nutritional requirement for each beneficiary category and corresponding period of food assistance, the total quantity of food required until the next harvest in October 2009 is estimated at 800 000 tonnes (consisting of cereals, pulses, oils, and fortified biscuits and blended foods).
- Weather-wise, 2008 was overall a very favourable year, but the agricultural sector could not fully take advantage of good conditions. Main reasons for the below-average production include:
- A long-term decline in soil fertility, mostly due to built-up acidity in soils reducing the plant absorption of nutrients from fertilizer;
- Perennial shortages of critical agricultural inputs, especially fuel and fertilizer;
- Vulnerability to extreme weather events, i.e. alarming trends in the concentration of summer rains, build-up in riverbeds, making them prone to flooding, and damaged or obsolete infrastructure;
- Structural factors, including constraints on market activities, use of natural resources, and unresolved distribution of potential benefits from higher productivity in both lowland and slope agriculture.
- Seeds were widely available in 2008, but fertilizer supplies were only 60 percent of deliveries in 2007 and fuel supplies amounted to about 70 percent of previous year's levels. Yields for the main season fell accordingly; prospects for the next winter/spring season are also very modest.
1. OVERVIEW
FAO and WFP conducted a Crop and Food Supply Assessment Mission (CFSAM) in the Democratic People's Republic of (DPRK) from 9 through 24 October 2008.(1) This was the first such exercise since 2004; in late 2005 the DPRK Government had decided to sharply curtail humanitarian assistance after a short series of good agricultural years. Until 2008, food aid operations by WFP and other actors had thus reduced considerably, and further CFSAMs were not deemed necessary by the DPRK Government. The relative improvement in the food balance, however, proved short-lived, especially since the country suffered severe flooding in 2007. As of early 2008, the terms of a new agreement between the DPRK Government and various parties included up to half a million tonnes of food aid from the United States,(2) a Rapid Food Security Assessment (RFSA) to be conducted in June 2008 and a CFSAM scheduled for October.
The RFSA and CFSAM constituted two important and relatively rare opportunities to update all parties' understanding of the food production, availability, access and utilization in the country. Most of the CFSAM team members, both from WFP and FAO sides, had already participated in the RFSA. The two exercises covered the beginning and end of the main cropping season, allowing for comparisons and combination of data collected during both instances, at the county, childcare institution, farming cooperatives, and household levels.
The June RFSA covered all ten provinces, WFP surveying eight of them, with the remaining two being surveyed by US NGOs. General agricultural and food production information was collected in eight provinces, with FAO doing much additional fieldwork in two of them, South Hamgyong and South Hwanghae. All RFSA information was made available to the CFSAM team, who built upon this knowledge by covering again six out of ten provinces: South Hamgyong, Kangwon, North Hwanghae, South Phyongan, North Phyongan, and South Hwanghae.(3) In June 2008, for example, the FAO team visited six counties and sixteen cooperative farms in South Hamgyong province, as well as four counties and 10 cooperative farms in South Hwanghae, while in October, during the CFSAM the team visited a total of ten counties and nine cooperative farms in six provinces. The WFP members of the team visited the same counties and, in each county, a number of childcare institutions and households; some of the WFP visits also included farm cooperatives. A sample of the information collected during the county and cooperative farm visits is presented in Appendices 3 and 4.
The June and October surveys, when taken together, constitute a fundamental part of the CFSAM, as complemented by review of existing documents, including government data, observations during travel time and cooperative visits, interviews with knowledgeable sources in Pyongyang, as well as earth observation sources (satellite imagery, satellite data-derived rainfall estimates, and normalized difference vegetation index, NDVI).