Hunger strikes: North Korea’s food shortages

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. At the fringes of America's politics lurk insidious conspiracy theories such as one called Qanon. Believers are vocal, dedicated and to date overwhelmingly white. But an increasing number of Hispanic Americans are falling under the theory's spell. And in India, the droplet shaped flowers of the mawa tree have a history that goes back further even than Hinduism as adornments or in medicines or oils. Our intrepid correspondent finds that the flowers also make for a fine moonshine. But first, This week, America's special envoy for North Korea, Sung Kim, is in Seoul. The newly appointed Mr. Kim said this week that he's willing to meet with North Korean officials anywhere, anytime. His meetings with South Korean officials form part of what the Biden administration has said are careful and calibrated efforts to deal with the North.

Most importantly, I think our two countries.

Agree on the shared commitment to pursue complete denuclearization of the Korean peninsula through diplomacy and dialogue.

Officials from Pyongyang should have good reason to come to the table. At a meeting of senior party members last week, Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un spoke of food shortages, saying that the people's food situation is now getting tense. It's a rare glimpse into just how troubled the country is.

So it's always very difficult to tell exactly how bad things are in North Korea because of the lack of information coming out of the country. But from what we know, it looks very bad.

Lena Shipper is the Economist's sole bureau chief.

So the United nations just came out with an estimate that households are probably going to experience a harsh lean period between August and October. There's a gap of about two months of food use. And also, we've had lots of anecdotal evidence coming out of North Korea in terms of market prices and that kind of thing. Even in Pyongyang, imported items like bananas cost something like $45 a kilo. There's been massive fluctuation in rice and grain prices. So overall, it's looking pretty bad.

And what's behind it? What's the cause of the shortages?

So the first cause which Kim Jong Un blames and which happens to be true is, is that last year's harvest was really bad. So there was very little rain early on in the year. And then there were three pretty terrible typhoons in August and September last year, which caused devastating floods and destroyed a good part of the harvest. The North Korean state Media said that one, on its own had destroyed 40,000 hectares of cropland and something like 17,000 homes. And according to external sources of weather stations outside the country, the summer and autumn of 2020 was one of the wettest periods on record since the early 1980s. So that means that the harvest was worse than usual, and it's now summer, which is when crops are running low anyway. So that explains a lot of why the situation's so bad.

A lot, but not all.

So that explains a lot of the situation, but it doesn't explain everything, because the other big factor we're looking at regarding North Korea and food security is the closed border to keep COVID 19 out. So ever since last year, Kim Jong Un has basically shut the border almost completely. Trade with China, which is the main sort of external source of things like food and fertilizer and fuel coming into the country, disappeared almost completely for parts of last year. It's still incredibly low. And we also have a continued imposition of sanctions from the United nations and the United States to persuade Kim Jong Un to stop his nuclear program. So all of these things are also contributing to the situation.

Well, at least some part of that, then, would have been foreseeable if a lot of the food comes into the country as imports, for example.

Yeah. So the food Situation in North Korea is never great, but the particularly bad situation now was foreseeable and has to some degree been acknowledged by the regime itself. So in January this year, Kim Jong Un said that the previous five year plan had failed in almost every sector. In April, he called on people to wage another, more difficult, arduous march, which is the term that was used for the famine in the 1990s that killed hundreds of thousands, possibly more than a million people. But now the language of food crisis that he used last week is particularly dire even compared to that.

And why make that admission, though? As a notoriously closed society that doesn't let this kind of information come out, why announce it?

I can't tell you exactly why he's doing it, but there are a couple of reasons that are imaginable. One is communicating externally, telling the outside world we're in a really bad place, and telling particularly America, you can help us get out of this very bad place by lifting some sanctions and making us an offer that we will like and that will cause us to come back to the negotiating table. The other thing is communicating internally, not everything state media has directed at the outside world, some of it is addressing the North Korean people saying, look, I realize that you're in a bad way and that you're having a much harder time than usual. And even though you're a totalitarian state, there is still some degree of acknowledgement you have to make to people that they're suffering and that you're aware of their suffering, because otherwise you don't know what they're going to do in response.

So what is the state doing to try to counteract the immediate problem?

So the regime last week said that they're going to throw resources at farming, they're going to focus on food production for the rest of the year, try to have better disaster management, particularly of things like typhoons, improve fertilizer production. But in the short term, it doesn't actually look like they're planning to do very much. Mr. Kim has said that COVID 19 needs to be beaten, and that's protracted war, which suggests that he's not planning to lift the border restrictions anytime soon. And that means that the situation where no outside aid that usually makes up for these food shortfalls can come in, is likely to continue. NGOs have had to leave the country. He's not shown any signs of accepting other offers of aid. South Korea's offered food aid. It's been turned down. There's a massive sense of paranoia of the pandemic coming into the country because North Korea still claims to have no cases. And this closing of the border seems to be the utmost priority at the moment.

But what about the part of the announcement that might be aimed at the likes of America and the lifting of sanctions? How likely is that?

I don't think there's going to be a fast process of lifting sanctions. The US Special envoy for North Korea, Sung Kim, was in Seoul this week and said they were willing to meet North Korea without preconditions anytime, but they didn't say that they were going to lift sanctions until there'd been a change in attitude on the North Korean side. So that process still seems pretty stalemated to me. And Kim Jong Un's signals I've similarly mixed. He said last week that the country is prepared for both dialogue and confrontation, which means precisely nothing could go either way. And his sister this week in response to the Sung Kim visit, doubled down on the more negative side of things, saying basically, dream on, guys, we're not going to come and come forward in any way unless you make us an offer. And despite the visit to Seoul this week of Sung Kim, there's no clear plan that's visible to me at the moment in the Biden administration for what they actually want to achieve with regard to North Korea and what their long term strategy is. So I don't really see there being any particularly impressive moves on either side of this stalemated situation for the next few months.

So in the short term anyway, it looks like this dire situation is set to continue.

Yeah, I'm afraid for the people of North Korea, there's no immediate hope of improvement of this pretty dire state of affairs.

Lena, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you very much for having me, Jason.

It's hard to think of a more outlandish premise for a conspiracy theory that America's government, media and financial worlds are all controlled by a group of satanic pedophiles at the center of a global child trafficking ring.

It doesn't tell you to follow one leader.

You can think about what you want.

With Q, but I follow the facts, I follow information and I think for myself and as American. Okay, nobody's going to tell me how to think yet.

A recent survey suggested that perhaps 15% of Americans believe in Qanon and hang on every word of its enigmatic leader, known simply as Q. Those believers are disproportionately white evangelicals. But the demographics of the theory's followers seem to be changing.

Cigadores de Vida is a Hispanic church in the outskirts of Miami. And it's led by a Dominican born pastor. His name is Rudy Gracia.

Johnny Williams writes about American affairs for the Economist.

And on any given Sunday, you'll notice very quickly that he will incorporate some extra biblical conspiracy theories into his teachings. He'll be telling his congregation about the need to resist evil forces in their lives, but that may include resisting lockdown orders. This is science. And he may make warnings about Dr. Anthony Fauci, an epidemiologist, and how he's trying to profit off of selling masks to them. The teachings that he has very often include conspiracy theories, include misinformation to his congregation.

And that kind of mix of religion and wild conspiracy theories is common in Hispanic churches or communities.

Conspiracy theories, especially in America, have been tied very closely to white evangelicals. But surveys have also indicated that Hispanic Americans and Hispanic evangelicals as well, are very curious about QAnon and about conspiracy theories and are drawn to them.

And why is that?

There's several reasons. Some of them are perhaps as simple as Hispanics tend to be more superstitious. Some of them also come from countries where corruption, government malfeasance are not uncommon. So if they hear that there is some kind of conspiracy or plot going on in the high levels of government, that may not be as strange to them as to other people. But Hispanic evangelicals, they actually are tracking very closely to their white counterparts. They are very socially conservative. They are very conservative in their theological beliefs. It is not a surprise that they may be drawn in very, very similar ways to some of the QAnon conspiracies. It fits very well with some of their theological beliefs going back to Rudy Gracia, the pastor who is talking about how the Antichrist is coming or some end time biblical prophecies. And that fits extremely close to some of the QAnon beliefs about an evil group of people who are trying to take over the government and who are trying to pave the way for the coming of the Antichrist.

And how is it that these groups of Hispanic Americans are being exposed to those ideas? Is it principally through churches like Mr. Gracias?

There is a whole ecosystem and of these ideas being spread among Hispanics and it also crosses borders into Latin America. So you will hear them at some churches like pastors like Mr. Gracia. But because Hispanics have so many connections to communities back home, they also ricochet across social media channels in some of those countries. So you may have some influencers and YouTubers that are actually based in other countries like Colombia or Venezuela, who will be very influential in communities in the United States, and especially when you're talking about South Florida.

But there's been a growing push by the tech giants to wipe out, to take away conspiracy theories. QAnon, what have you, is that not at work in this case?

So there have been some successful efforts to stop QAnon and conspiracy theories from spreading on social media. Facebook has been able to crack down on some QAnon groups that formed over the past couple years. For example, QAnon Costa Rica and Cunan, Colombia. But also what you're seeing is that a lot of the misinformation spreads across encrypted messaging apps. It cannot be moderated or tracked that way. It's very hard to really do something about it, to crack down on it. Another thing that I heard from computer scientists and researchers is that a lot of the tech companies, their primary language that they use for AI to track in stop conspiracy theories is English. So it doesn't always catch what may be some bizarre conspiracies in Spanish.

And aside from kind of technological approaches to this, what is there to be done?

So there are some groups that are trying to address this problem. There's a nonprofit called First Draft. What they do is they train fact checkers to detect and to counter misinformation and in Spanish. And they work with Spanish language newspapers so they can train reporters who can then identify misinformation and correct it so that Spanish speakers have official sources of information where they can verify whether what they're reading is true or not. And there's also some other groups like the National Latino Evangelical Coalition, which is a network of about 3,000 Hispanic churches in America.

And.

And what they've done is that they have partnered with the Department of Health and Human Services to host webinars in Spanish where they answer questions about COVID 19 and why it's important to take the vaccine. So hopefully what they're doing is they're establishing trust with Spanish speakers. These efforts may help, but it is unlikely that they will really do much to stop the spread of misinformation, because so much of it is unregulated. So much of it spreads through channels that cannot really be tracked. And as long as the misinformation keeps spreading unregulated, it will continue to be a serious problem.

Johnny, thank you very much for your time.

Thank you, Jason.

The mawa is an Indian tree with immense cultural significance. In a 4th century poem, the consort Parvati of the God Shiva wears the tree's pale flowers as a Garland. Those flowers can be eaten raw or used to make medicine or household oils. They also make a pretty good booze, which is becoming available ever more widely.

In March, as the summer heat in India really kicks in, the mawa trees spread out through these open forests, drop all their leaves and have only the flowers. These little buds more like yellow berries than flowers with petals. Those fall down and people start gathering them from the ground.

Alex Trevelly is the Economist's Asia News editor. He recently went to a harvest.

I went to see this being done in a part of India called Buster, in the state of Chhattisgarh. This has been going on for thousands of years. You'll rummage around in the dead leaves, picking them up, or maybe you'll burn away the leaves into a thin, black ash, which. Which makes it easier to spot the blossoms and pick them up into your basket. One innovation that they've come up with recently is to string great big nets beneath the trees. These nets are sometimes stitched together of cheap saris. They make giant trampolines. And these pick the flowers for the people, essentially.

So why is the flower and the drink so significant to these locals?

At the basis level, it's of great economic importance in these parts. The harvest comes at a great time for ordinary people to earn some money between their ordinary crops. But there's a much, much deeper significance also that goes back at least to the dawn of Hinduism in India and probably quite a lot further. These groups have been in India since longer than the people we now call Indians, and they've been doing one thing or another with the magical juice of these flowers for all that time. So these tribes are, in a way, Hindus. But it's a bit arguable their religion is more primordial, and a lot of their practices are, say, very unorthodox.

But you mentioned the drink in particular has been demonized in the past.

That's right. And it's true of a lot of liquor in India that it's heavily regulated with a sort of understanding that it's a bad thing and ought to be kept from people. This is especially true of the tribals and their traditional distilled spirits. So the mawa flower is something you're not allowed to buy or sell in some districts. It's a very valuable product, but one that you're not allowed to trade between India and state lines. For the most part. That's starting to change. There are a few places, like the state of Jharkhand, that are developing an appreciation for Mahua Charkhand, for instance. Set up a Mahua conference to study its possibilities and problems. Earlier this year, bureaucrats realized that there's an opportunity to do something much better for the tribal people who live there and live with the flower than to just ban it from everyday use.

And have you tried it? What's it taste like?

It's hard to describe what mawa tastes like. I had a swig straight from a bottle that was still hot and it was delicious. There was a subtle tast of the flower itself somewhere deep in that fiery bottle.

Thanks very much for joining us, Alex.

Thank you, Jason.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, leave us a rating and a review and you can subscribe to the economist@examiner.com intelligenceoffer. The link is in the show Notes. See you back here tomorrow.