Attachments
Marcus Noland
ABSTRACT
Over the past several years, North Korea has adopted legal changes that are increasing the centrality of the Workers Party of Korea and the state in agricultural production, distribution, and consumption. This development changes the basic nature of food insecurity in North Korea from one in which access to food is determined by the ability to purchase it in the market to one in which access to food is determined by political status. This development is of potential policy relevance: Although current conditions do not appear to be severe, if and when North Korea experiences another food crisis, foreign partners are likely to encounter a state-dominated model more closely resembling the system that existed in the early 1990s at the onset of the famine and with it the attendant problems that humanitarian-relief agencies confronted at that time.
1. INTRODUCTION
For much of its history, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, or North Korea, was a classic centrally planned economy in which the state owned the means of production and orchestrated production, distribution, and consumption through a state-administered plan. North Korea was notable only in the rigor with which markets, and economic activity outside the plan, were repressed. That system began to fray in the 1980s. In the 1990s, the country experienced a devastating famine that led to an unplanned, bottom-up marketization of the economy. Given the unintended nature of this evolution, the regime has never been entirely comfortable with the market and has not built the foundational institutions of a modern market economy. In the intervening years, policy has gone through cycles of relaxation, effectively ratifying practices on the ground, followed by reassertion of state control. At present, North Korea appears to be going through one of those cycles of recentralization, particularly in the food economy. Over the past several years, it has adopted legal changes that are increasing the centrality of the state in agricultural production, distribution, and consumption. This development is changing the basic nature of food insecurity in North Korea from one in which access to food is determined by the ability to purchase it in the market to one in which access to food is determined by political status. The current efforts to reassert state control over the food economy appear to be more fundamental than in the recent past, in effect seeking to turn back the clock. This development is of more than purely intellectual interest: If and when North Korea experiences another food crisis, foreign partners are likely to encounter a state-dominated model more closely resembling the system that existed in the early 1990s at the onset of the famine, and the attendant problems that humanitarian-relief agencies confronted at that time, than the more market-oriented system that emerged after the famine.