Dialogue on the North Korea Economy International Humanitarian Aid to North Korea: Progress, Results, and Controversy Since the first provision of international food assistance in the mid-1990s, humanitarian aid to North Korea has been a constant source of scrutiny and debate. It was not only a major contributing factor to ending the devastating famine in the mid-to-late 1990s, but it has continuously helped with improving both the food situation and public welfare. Above all, humanitarian aid has become a vital channel that connects North Korea with the global community, and the increased contact that providing humanitarian aid has enabled has led many to believe that cooperating with the once hostile and isolated society may not be entirely impossible. Despite the advantages, however, there has been never-ending controversy surrounding the humanitarian aid to North Korea aid. Some of the main issues include whether the aid is being misappropriated to those in power and the military, whether the aid has had an actual impact on vulnerable groups, why the regime accepts help but continues to provoke, and whether, under the circumstances, humanitarian aid even needs to continue. Of course, we do not have a definite answer to any of these questions as of yet. But, it has been over 20 years since North Korea received humanitarian aid and it has yielded vast amounts of information and data. Accordingly, we would like to examine this from diverse aspects with one of the world’s leading scholars in the field, Professor Hazel Smith.   ♦  Interviewer: Lee, Suk (Senior Fellow at KDI) ♦  Interviewee: Hazel Smith (Advisory Fellow at KDI)     1. Overview Lee, Suk Q. How and when did the international humanitarian aid to North Korea begin? Who led the initiative and why? Hazel Smith I think probably, before we get into the detail of what happened, when and why, we need to first specify what we mean by humanitarian assistance. An important distinction, for example, needs to be made between what constitutes humanitarian assistance and what constitutes development assistance. Humanitarian assistance and development assistance are very different from each other and it’s important to understand the difference otherwise we can have quite unrealistic expectations about what either of these types of assistance can be expected to achieve. Humanitarian assistance, which we will be talking about today, is emergency aid, designed to save lives. It is only designed to provide short term help. It is not designed to provide support for economic development and/or designed to rectify the faults that brought about the need for humanitarian or emergency aid in the first place. 설을 해외로 이전했던 기업의 국내 복귀를 뜻하며, 최근 들어 중요한 정책 사안으로 주목받고 있다. Development assistance by contrast is comprised of  medium to long term economic assistance, designed to support economic growth and improve the social welfare of  a given society.  Humanitarian aid, because it is designed to save lives in emergencies, is unconditional. Development assistance is different in that it is conditional, economically and/or politically, in that recipient governments must adhere to donor conditions, normally negotiated between donor and recipient government.  Humanitarian assistance is given when governments fail, in that they cannot guarantee basic human survival without outside help. This can happen in natural disasters, in war and conflict and where there is severe economic distress. Development assistance by contrast is allocated to functioning, effective governments with which donors work in partnership, on the basis of  medium to long term shared economic aims and objectives. So what does all this mean for understanding humanitarian assistance to the DPRK? Almost all international assistance to the DPRK has been humanitarian assistance. North Korea has never received substantive development assistance unlike other underdeveloped, countries including the much wealthier India and China. China even today, although both a Communist country and an important global economic player, continues to receive international development assistance. It is true that some individual farms received technical assistance from the IFAD – that is the International  Fund  for  Agricultural  Development  – and bilateral agencies like the SDC and from some NGOs, but the country has never received development assistance designed to support national reconstruction of  the agricultural sector, or any other strategic, medium or long-term development aid. Most donors tried to incorporate elements of  ongoing technical assistance into the larger humanitarian programmes – for example in offering training and technical advice and this is normal practice everywhere in the world where a humanitarian emergency becomes protracted, for example in Afghanistan, but these efforts to provide technical support were ancillary to the main humanitarian programmes that mostly delivered commodities of  one sort or another – mostly food but also various inputs like medicines, agricultural equipment, children’s winter clothing.  International aid to North Korea, being humani- tarian in nature, was designed to save lives and alleviate suffering in the short term. It was never designed to bring economic growth, either across the economy more broadly, or even in the food sector, which has been the recipient of  most humanitarian assistance.    "International aid to North Korea, being humanitarian in nature, was designed to save lives and alleviate suffering in the short term. "   What this means is that, in terms of  assessing efficacy of  assistance to the DPRK, the appropriate and relevant judgment then is not whether or how much international assistance improved the medium- and long-term well-being of  the population, because humanitarian assistance is not designed to do that. The appropriate question is instead – did international humanitarian assistance to the DPRK save lives in the short term?  We can discuss the detail, but in summary, we have a lot of  evidence that international humanitarian assistance to the DPRK indeed saved many lives, especially in the late 1990s and early 2000s when the country was emerging from famine and when international humanitarian assistance was large enough to make a difference.  There is a big contrast between those days and more recent years. Since 2021 international humanitarian aid to the DPRK has been negligible – even as our current knowledge of  the DPRK indicates the existence of  a severe national food emergency and we have credible, unrefuted reports of  families starving to death, this year, in 2023.   To go back to the question then of  when, how and why international humanitarian aid to North Korea began, the first part of  the question is the easiest to answer. The DPRK started to receive large-scale international humanitarian assistance in the second half  of  the 1990s. To understand why it received such assistance, we have to go back in history a little bit.  After the end of  the Korean War in 1953, the DPRK had pursued a policy of  industrialization, but it also redeveloped domestic agriculture, with the aim of  being self-sufficient in food production.  Food self-sufficiency was never really achieved as improvements in grain production always depended on hidden subsidies from abroad – mainly in the form of  cheap imports and technology transfers. Until the end of  the Cold War in Europe in 1989/ 1990, North Korea received aid from allies within the Soviet Union’s sphere of  influence, including Eastern Europe, as well as from the Soviet Union itself. Some of  this we might classify today as development assistance – that is economic assistance to the government, although the government never acknowledged how dependent it was on help from abroad. Even with outside help though, the North Korean government did not achieve a stable food supply, to the extent that famine conditions emerged in the 1950s and again in the 1970s.    "Food self-sufficiency was never really achieved as improvements in grain production always depended on hidden subsidies from abroad – mainly in the form of cheap imports and technology transfers. " In the 1970s, well before it joined the United Nations as a full member in 1991, the DPRK started to engage with UN development agencies; it joined the UN World Health Organisation in 1973, the FAO in 1977 and the UNDP in 1979. UNDP even established a residential presence in the DPRK in 1980 – although its international officers did not become resident in North Korea until the 1990s.  In this period, UNDP gave some technical advice on trade and UNICEF conducted a nutrition survey in Kangwon, in 1988, led by an Australian nutritionist, but none of  these contacts resulted in agreements to provide long term development assistance. Nor did the DPRK ask for humanitarian assistance from the UN agencies at this stage.    "In the 1980s and early 1990s, the DPRK very much saw itself as a global provider of international humanitarian assistance. " In fact, in the 1980s and early 1990s, the DPRK very much saw itself  as a global provider of  international humanitarian assistance; and it had some good reasons for this self-perception. During the Cold War era, the DPRK provided military and development assistance abroad, the latter in the form of  technical support for agriculture and in the construction sector  in a number of  African countries. Between 1959 and 1961, during the Chinese famine, there is some evidence that Chinese citizens came over the border to access food from North Korea. The DPRK also trained doctors from abroad for instance from Mongolia, in Pyongyang. The DPRK government was extremely proud of  its activities abroad which it saw as evidence that North Korea should be understood as an important global player.  What changed of  course was the end of  the Cold War when the Soviet Union and East and Central European states abandoned Communism – and China, although it remained politically Communist, was transforming itself  economically into a market- oriented state.