Famine in North Korea: markets, aid, and reform

Introduction: Famine, aid, and markets in North Korea -- The origins of the great famine -- The distribution of misery : famine and the breakdown of the public distribution system -- The aid regime : the problem of monitoring -- Diversion -- The political economy of aid -- Coping, marketization, and reform : new sources of vulnerability -- Conclusion : North Korea in comparative and international perspective

In the mid-1990s, as many as one million North Koreans died in one of the worst famines of the twentieth century. Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland present the most comprehensive and penetrating account of the famine to date, examining not only the origins and aftermath of the crisis but also the regime's response to outside aid and the effect of its current policies on the country's economic future. North Korea's famine exemplified the depredations that can arise from tyrannical rule and the dilemmas such regimes pose for the humanitarian community. To reveal the state's culpability is a vita

Beginning sometime in the early 1990s and extending into 1998, North Korea experienced famine. We estimate that the great North Korean famine killed between six hundred thousand and one million people, between 3 and 5 percent of the entire population of the country. Such events are national traumas that live in the collective memory for generations. Famines produce countless personal tragedies: watching loved ones waste away from hunger and disease; making fateful choices about the distribution of scarce food; migrating to escape the famine's reach; and, all too often, facing the stark reality that these coping strategies are futile. A full understanding of such disasters can only be communicated through their human face: the individual experience of the suffering and humiliation that extreme deprivation brings to its victims. Through refugee accounts, this human face of the North Korean famine is slowly becoming available to us and speaks far more eloquently than we can here