Peer reviewed analysis from world leading experts

Dilemmas and policy options for US aid to North Korea

Reading Time: 6 mins

In Brief

Since 1995 the US has ‘provided North Korea with over US$1.2 billion in assistance’ -- about 60 per cent for food aid and about 40 per cent for energy assistance to North Korea.

The provision of this aid has raised difficult political, moral and policy dilemmas.

Share

  • A
  • A
  • A

Share

  • A
  • A
  • A

Mark Manyin and Mary Beth Nikitin recently released an updated and insightful Congressional Research Service report on ‘Foreign Assistance to North Korea’. They trace the evolution of US aid to North Korea from the early 1990s until the present — including bilateral aid and multilateral aid conducted through the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organisation (KEDO), the Six-Party Talks and the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) — highlighting the dilemmas US policymakers face in formulating and implementing US aid policy toward North Korea, the stop-start nature of the aid flow, and outlining future policy options.

One argument in the United States is that Pyongyang has resisted reforms that would help it to better provide access to food for its population. This includes ‘economic reforms that would help pay for food imports or increase domestic production, as well as the political reforms that would allow for a more equitable distribution of food’.

A second is that access to monitor food aid distribution has been problematic. Multiple sources have alleged that ‘a sizeable amount of the food assistance going to North Korea is routinely diverted for resale in private markets or other uses’. The North Korean government often ‘restricts the ability of donors to monitor shipments of aid’, and the negotiation of monitoring access has been a recurrent struggle between the US government and the UN WFP on the one hand and the North Korean government on the other.

A third is that assistance of any kind is fungible. ‘Funds that the [North Korean] government otherwise would have spent on food can be spent on other items, such as the military’.

These dilemmas are compounded by the fact that North Korea receives aid from many sources, particularly unconditional aid from China and South Korea (at least it did under the sunshine policy of Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun before Lee Myung-bak assumed power in Seoul).

The tradeoff with these dilemmas is that ‘it is likely that food aid has helped feed millions of North Koreans, possibly staving off a repeat of the famine conditions that existed in North Korea in the mid-late 1990s’. Some argue also that ‘a well designed food aid program can facilitate the expansion of markets, which over time will erode the Kim regime’s hold over the country’.

In attempting to work through these dilemmas, domestic US political squabbles and disagreements between the US and North Korean governments have resulted in aid being delivered in ebbs and flows. ‘The provision of aid to North Korea has given [the US] Congress a vehicle to influence … policy toward the DPRK’. At times, disagreements among US Congress people, and between Congress and the President, have hampered a coordinated approach. The positions of US Congress on food aid to North Korea range from those who advocate food aid ‘on humanitarian grounds … regardless of the actions of the North Korean regime’, to those who call for ‘food assistance to be conditioned upon North Korean cooperation on monitoring and access’, to those who outright oppose the provision of any food aid barring significant political changes in Pyongyang. Typically, this has resulted in Congress using its power to impose conditions and reporting requirements on funds authorized for aid to North Korea.

While ‘officially US policy de-links food and humanitarian aid from strategic interests’ it is ‘documented that the Clinton administration used food aid to secure North Korean participation and increased cooperation in security-related negotiations’. The Bush administration officially linked food aid to North Korea to three criteria: ‘the need in North Korea, competing needs on US food assistance, and ‘verifiable progress’ in North Korea allowing the humanitarian community improved access and monitoring’. Some experts have argued that food aid flows between 2001-2005 suggest a US desire to use aid to ‘influence talks over North Korea’s nuclear program’. But the resumption of food aid in 2008 suggested a ‘tighter link to issues of access and monitoring of food shipments’. Obama Administration policy has continued to use the same three criteria as those the Bush Administration applied.

In the wake of North Korean appeals for food aid earlier this year, US Special Envoy for Human Rights in North Korea, Ambassador Robert King led a delegation in late May to determine North Korean food needs, though any official US decision is yet to be made. Hence the pertinence of this timely analysis of the policy options available to the Obama administration.

Manyin and Nikitin outline five policy options for future US food aid to North Korea.

The first option is to ‘establish explicit diplomatic linkages by conditioning food aid on progress in security-related talks, such as … the North’s nuclear programs’. In the past this approach has produced some short-term successes, but overall it has not ‘induced significant changes in North Korea’s long-term behavior on security issues’. Additionally this approach risks undermining efforts to monitor food aid distribution.

The second is to ‘set explicit humanitarian linkages by conditioning future food aid on improvements in access and monitoring’. The impact of food aid diversion abuses can also be mitigated to some extent by delivering food aid through directly to ‘North Korea’s historically poorer and politically marginalised northern provinces’.

A third is the option of pressuring China on its food aid to North Korea either publicly or privately, something missing from both the Bush and Obama administrations’ discussion list with China. But China is unlikely to entirely cut off its aid flow given its interest ‘in preserving North Korean stability’. A more practical fallback position would be to encourage China to keep ‘food assistance only at a subsistence level needed to maintain stability in North Korea’.

A fourth option is deciding ‘whether and how to harmonise policy with Seoul’. Lee Myung-bak has taken a tougher approach to North Korea than his two predecessors, and this was only reinforced by the Cheonan sinking and the shelling of Yeonpyeong Island. Ambassador King, has said that, ‘South Korea would prefer that the United States not provide food aid to North Korea’. Critics of food aid policy contend that the US ‘should not provide food … because it might create a rift with South Korea’. Proponents argue that ‘US-South Korea cooperation on North Korea is sufficiently strong to sustain different approaches’.

Finally, if aid is resumed, the US must consider what mix to use of NGO and WFP channels for delivering food aid. In 2008 the Bush administration increased the use of NGO channels up to 20 per cent of total US food aid to North Korea. NGOs have had greater access and monitoring success dealing ‘principally with local North Korean officials, who often have more incentive to be more cooperative than the central government’. The WFP on the other hand has the institutional capacity to operate nationally and target millions more, assuming it can get access.

Ben Ascione is a Masters candidate in international relations at the Graduate School of Asia Pacific Studies, Waseda University, a research assistant at the Japan Center for International Exchange, and an associate editor of EAF.

Comments are closed.

Support Quality Analysis

Donate
The East Asia Forum office is based in Australia and EAF acknowledges the First Peoples of this land — in Canberra the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people — and recognises their continuous connection to culture, community and Country.

Article printed from East Asia Forum (https://www.eastasiaforum.org)

Copyright ©2024 East Asia Forum. All rights reserved.