Prof Cites Lack of Market Opportunities in North Korea's Woes

North Korean poverty is a result of a dearth of market opportunity, not agricultural inability, said University of Warwick Professor Hazel Smith to an audience of about thirty at Harvard’s Korea Institute yesterday.

“I argue that market opportunities matter as much as provincial agricultural capacities in explaining the economic well-being of provincial populations,” Smith said. Her data illustrated the “non-correlation between agricultural capacity and nutritional statuses of provinces.”

“It’s a show and tell really—it’s not quite an argument,” Smith said of her work’s thesis.

Smith presented research indicating that if the ability of a province to grow food were the only factor in malnutrition rates, North Korea’s capital Pyongyang would have the worst levels of malnutrition in the country. However, Pyongyang ranks highest in citizen nutrition, while the breadbasket province of South Hwanghae is among the worst.

Smith explained that the disparity between Pyongyang and South Hwanghae’s hunger problems—despite the latter region’s high agricultural capabilities—stems in part from the fact that “the population of South Hwanghae had little regular contact with foreigners with whom they could earn or obtain hard currency and thus few opportunities to buy and sell food.”

Moreover, she continued, the state’s political machinery rests in the capital, which “facilitated the extraction of South Hwanghae’s grain” to feed the Pyongyang population, meaning that while South Hwanghae could produce the food, the province lacked the economic and political capacity to keep the food for its own residents.

During a question-and-answer session, some audience members provided anecdotes to flesh out the discussion of hunger in North Korea.

Carter J. Eckert, a Harvard professor of Korean history, said that on one trip to North Korea, he “could see people scrounging in the mountains for any sort of food.”

Eckert also cited the rise of makeshift markets in response to the lack of food.

“The Chinese came in with bags of rice, and they were trading this rice for the Koreans’ marine products,” Eckert said. “A market had developed, a barter kind of trade was taking place.”

In presenting her findings, Smith warned against premature judgment about the responsibility of governments for their citizens’ malnutrition.

“We can distinguish between knowledge and opinion even on North Korea,” she said. “If North Korea is committing crimes by allowing children to starve, then so are countries like India and Cambodia.”