It is not meant for all those adorable big eyed babies and colorfully dressed women. It is meant to be stolen and/or sold- to the military, bandits, anyone. When there is an actual food shortage, all that matters is getting raw calories into the country. if you can pump enough calories in, eventually those who are in need will get a share. If it is the more likely famine situation where the poor cannot afford food, pumping food in can depress the market enough that it becomes affordable. This creates problems in the long run, but when it’s a matter of life and death, you do what you gotta do.
But that cand estroy a country’s economic base, and stll doesn’t neccessarily solve the problem. Aside from which, if it’s getting sold overseas, then it doesn’t really do a damn thing to help the people in need.
Are you really worried about destroying North Korea’s economic base? What do you think you are going to destroy there?
There are a lot of ways to give food aid, each appropriate for different circumstances. Sometimes you just give bags of food. This is useful after a natural disaster or other acute, short-term crisis where if you can tide people over for a few weeks. in the US, for example, if there was a massive natural disaster, we’d hope that there would be some way to eat. It’s not much different in other countries.
It can be useful in the long run where situations are just to fucked up to be fixed. This includes situations where a government refuses to do anything for their own people, and the only hope is to try to keep people alive and keep working on solutions on the political level. Or when there are ultra-long term refugee camps where the people literally have no way to integrate into their host country. Kenya, for example, is never ever going to let the Somali refugees integrate, and there is no way they can go back home. What can you do?
In other situation, monetization may be appropriate. This is when the donor gives food to NGOs or other organizations for free or at a steep discount to sell into the local market. The food funds the NGOs, and the food aid is integrated more seamlessly into the local market.
Cash transfers are increasingly popular, and they really do work. It turns out when you give people in emergencies cash, they use it to buy what they need and they have a much better handle on what they need than any outsider. But this is a hard thing to get funding for (we all want to feel like we are giving food to hungry little babies, not just handing people cash) and has its own economic complications.
Anyway, in all of this discussion it’s important to understand the difference between humanitarian aid and development aid. Humanitarian aid is about saving lives, full stop. It’s about saving lives when people need it. Development aid is about long term outcomes. Food aid is great for humanitarian aid, and not great for development aid. But we are still figuring out how to manage these two paradigms.
Not in North korea’s case, no. But this has had debilitatuing effects in other countries, as families which can no longer profitibly farm leave the land and become refugees, thus creating more need for food aid, which brings more in and drops food prices even further.
North Koreans can’t get to South Korea. That leaves them China. There is a fair amount of illegal immigration in the area near the border there. The North Koreans work as farm labor in China. They take a tremendous risk crossing the border, facing death or imprisonment (another form of death), or simply return to their home (another form of death) from North Korea. And as policy, they are returned if found by the Chinese. Since North Korea does not produce enough to keep it’s own population alive, they have no incentive to waste limited resources on non-productive people. North Korea’s existence is based on extortion. They are demanding protection money to stop them from causing massive death and destruction in South Korea, and regional and worldwide instability. Peasants who cannot produce enough to feed the regime and themselves are a cost which can’t be justified in terms of maintaining the extortion racket. Leaving North Korea works about as well as leaving the Mafia.
There are two things being discussed here: Food Aid, and Food Aid specifially in the case of North Korea. There’s some question as to whether, or how much, of the Food Aid in north Korea usefully aided any needy citizens, or was simply siphoned off by the military for their use or for export. If so, then it did little good, apart from propping up Kim’s tottering regime. It may, at best, have allowed citizens to retain otherwise-confiscating food, in which case it might have helped.
In general, Food Aid is handled badly and can harm local agriculture, and the economy in general. I try to keep the general issues apart from the specific, but in case I was not clear about the distinction, there it is.
It seems like eventually the North Koreans would starve off enough of the population to where they could support the rest with their food production. (Not exactly what I think they had in mind with “Juche” but I guess it does kind of fit the mold somewhat.) But that hasn’t happened, even with the massive death tolls from all the famines. Why not?
I suspect the answer is that this is not Sahel or India 1960’s, where there was zero crops; I suspect the answer is that people are starving to the point of desperation, some were dying, but not everyone was dropping like flies. One article I read said the malnutrition was so bad that NK escapees were instantly recognized in SK because they were at least a head shorter due to malnutrition.
One consideration about aid - in order for the “trickle-down theory” of food aid to work, you have to give enough additional food to fill the bellies of the army and the elite class in NK, and then the most important factory workers (military equipment production?). Only then will these stop confiscating too much of the general agricultural production. How many shiploads of fuel do you need to do this for the tens of millions in NK?
And still - the issue is - who besides the army has the manpower and equipment to distribute food aid? Not to mention the fuel supplies. A shipload of grain is useless unless delivered to the end consumers.
If I’m not mistaken, North Korea actually has a large part of its population belonging to the military, mandatory military service being absurdly long (something like 5 or 6 years, I think). So, that’s a lot of bellies to fill.
My favorite NK food story is the one about the family that was severely punished because their 8 year old son was caught picking out undigested corn kernels out of cow pies in a field near their home.