Feeding North Korea

The world sees North Korea and South Korea together at the Olympics and feels relief that North Korean leader Kim Jong Il seems intent on bringing his nation out of its self-imposed exile. But the real relief is just starting to occur not in Sydney but in Pyongyang, where the crisis of food shortages that caused hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, to die of starvation are reported to be diminishing.

Much of the international credit for this goes to the nongovernmental organizations that kept food shipments going into North Korea, if not always to the people who needed it most, and to the United States, which in the last five years has supplied $400 million in food and other commodities to try to feed a starving nation and at the same time persuade its government to back off its missile program. Success, from the U.S. point of view, has been mixed: It isn’t clear where missile talks, scheduled for next week in New York, will take the two nations, and certainly not all the food aid made it where it was most needed in the countryside.

But if the news reports from just 18 months ago were correct, North Korea, even according to the official Korean central News Agency, was at “the crossroads of life and death.” Now it is not. The short-term relief of food aid made a difference, although the nation still needs assistance to replenish its soil and make it productive enough again to grow enough food to feed the nation. Currently, according to the World Food Program, it produces only 72 percent of the food it needs.

Bringing more aid and agricultural reform will not be easy to a nation that may now rank as the world’s most isolated. Yet not only is the rapprochement with South Korea a positive symbol, it has practical consequences – trade between the two nation’s doubled last year to $330 million, with more deals promised. The key for North Korea to increase tade elsewhere will be to convince more stable nations that Kim Jong Il will not reverse on a whim the small gains made during the last year. After the apparent miscommunication earlier this year between him and Valdimir Putin over missile development, that’s won’t be simple.

But the potential benefits for the people of North Korea and the possibility of avoiding a missile confrontation make the effort worthwhile. And that makes the recent gains, however tentative, good news.