Access to market key issue in North Korea's food security

The 2018 International Conference on Humanitarian and Development Assistance to the DPRK was held at the Kim Koo Museum in Seoul, Wednesday. Korea Times photo by Jung Da-min

By Jung Da-min

Some might think North Korea's food supply and demand would be unstable, but prices in the market are remarkably steady, according to Kwon Tae-jin, director of the Center for North Korean and Northeast Asian Studies at the GS&J Institute.

It comes against the background that North Korea's rationing system does not work properly, Kwon said at the 2018 International Conference on Humanitarian and Development Assistance to the DPRK at the Kim Koo Museum in Seoul, Wednesday.

The Korean Sharing Movement hosted the event with the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung Korea and Gyeonggi Province.

Kwon said how to increase residents' access to the market or, more fundamentally, how to increase their incomes, was the priority. He also called for a review of the country's food security and its agricultural policies.

Kwon attributed North Korea's stable food market prices to the country's unrecorded imports from neighboring countries including China.

"Merchants are providing as much food as the people need," Kwon said. "My presumption is that the unofficial total of imports would be much more than official imports."

Those with accessibility to the market and decent incomes were responsible for the changed patterns of food consumption that have been observed, Kwon said.

"If it was the problem of gaining calories from grains in the past, now North Korean people want to eat protein, that is, meat, as well as vegetables and fruits," Kwon said.

A vendor carries vegetables in Pyongyang's Yonggwang Street in this 2004 file photo. Korea Times

Yoon Ji-hyun, a professor in Seoul National University's Department of Food and Nutrition, said 40 percent of people still eat corn because they are poor, citing a survey in 2016 by Seoul National University's Institute for Peace and Unification Studies of about 100 defectors.

"Only 18 percent, or one in five, eat protein including meat or fish on daily basis, while most people eat protein once or twice a week, or once or twice a month, according to the survey," Yoon said.

She said many pregnant women and infants still suffer malnutrition. Although overall child malnutrition has decreased, the gap has widened between regions, with the chronic malnutrition rate at 10.1 percent in Pyongyang and 31.8 percent in Ryanggang Province in 2017 when the average was 19.1 percent, according to the "Levels and Trends in Child Malnutrition" report by UNICEF, the World Health Organization and World Bank Group.

"According to a 2005 report titled 'Linkages between Poverty Reduction Strategies and Child Nutrition ― An Asian Perspective,' the rate at which nutritional status improves when economic conditions develop was estimated to be 50 percent. That is, if North Korea's GDP grows 10 percent, the rate of nutrition improvement would only be 5 percent," Yoon said.

"The paper demonstrated it could be improved more efficiently only when there was a direct effort to improve the nutrition problem, and it could further lead to efficient development of the country's overall economy."

Other experts at the forum called on the international community to focus attention on humanitarian aid for North Korea, saying practical sanctions relief was needed.

Among them were officials from NGOs providing humanitarian aid to North Korea, including Triangle Generation Humanitaire (TGH) and Christian Friends of Korea, and scholars from Korea, the U.S., China and Europe.

Unification Minister Cho Myong-gyon made the keynote speech, saying the government is seeking to widen inter-Korean exchanges on sustainable development of the Korean Peninsula.

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