Climate change and North Korea

By John Burton

North Korea's agricultural sector has long been mismanaged, but climate change is now making the situation much worse.

Over the past year, North Korea has seen record summer temperatures, severe droughts and then damaging floods from heavy rainfall due to typhoons ― all the result of changing Arctic weather patterns caused by global warming.

Two U.N. agencies, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Food Program (WFP), estimated recently that North Korea produced 4.9 million tons of crops last year, its worst harvest in a decade, resulting in a food shortfall of 1.36 million tons. Total food supply fell by 9 percent.

The outlook for this year looks dire. The production of the early harvest is 20 percent lower than last year due to a reduced amount of snow, which normally covers the ground and protects early harvest crops such as wheat, barley and potato crops.

Some of the food that survived last year's bad weather was left in fields for weeks due to a lack of transport and fuel caused by international sanctions and was then eaten by rats and insects.

State rations, upon which 70 percent of the population depends, have been cut from 550 grams to 300 grams of food a day and could be reduced further this summer ahead of the fall harvest. The WFP estimates that 10.1 million people are at risk of food shortages.

North Korea's farming sector has been plagued by a host of problems: lack of arable land, inefficient cooperative farms and the impact of international sanctions. But abnormal weather conditions caused by global warming represent an increasing long-term threat.

Climate change in Northeast Asia is more severe than global trends, according to researchers, and North Korea is the most vulnerable country in the region. North Korea "is seriously affected by climate change," the FAO said in a recent report.

North Korea's chronic agricultural situation is also a case study of how climate change is impacting geopolitical issues. It is a key reason why North Korean leader Kim Jong-un wants immediate relief from international sanctions imposed in response to Pyongyang's nuclear program.

North Korea's willingness to engage with U.N. climate and environmental programs, including signing the Paris climate agreement, is viewed as one way to help break its economic isolation, while acknowledging the threat of climate change.

Pyongyang is using the climate change argument to seek technology and financial support from potential international investors for renewable energy projects and a modern power grid, including a nuclear plant.

Climate change is also leading to domestic economic changes. In the wake of the country's famine in the mid-1990s, the government has tolerated the growth of black markets for rice and other agricultural products in an effort to incentivize farmers to help feed the population. The development of a hybrid market economy is likely to continue as a result of the impact of climate change on agriculture.

But North Korea will have to undertake more fundamental reforms if it is to deal with the effects of climate change. That means overhauling its collective agricultural sector and the ways it farms.

It should be noted that while South Korea has suffered the same climatic conditions as North Korea, its agricultural "problem" is dealing with surplus rice supplies. Even as the Seoul government continues to push for lower rice production and encourages farmers to reduce rice acreage by offering financial incentives, output is likely to increase this year.

What separates North and South Korea in terms of agricultural production is that the latter achieves far higher crop yields. Rice yields in South Korea are slightly more than 7 tons per hectare, while they are less than 4 tons in North Korea. In the 1980s, North Korea was achieving yields of 8 tons per hectare before they collapsed to 3 tons in the mid-1990s, triggering the country's great famine.

South Korea also once suffered from low agricultural productivity. But in the 1960s and 1970s, yield rates nearly doubled due to the planting of new high-yield varieties and the increased use of fertilizers.

Although North Korea has also been developing high-yield varieties, it still suffers from soil erosion and environmental degradation such as deforestation, which makes agriculture vulnerable to natural disasters caused by climate change. International sanctions and a lack of foreign currency mean it suffers from a perennial shortage of fertilizer, agro-chemicals, seeds, modern farm machinery and clean fuel. Moreover, the government's quest to achieve agricultural self-sufficiency results in rigid institutional structures and weak incentives that reduce food production.

Climate change means North Korea is likely to remain dependent on international aid to feed its population. But Pyongyang will increasingly face the dilemma of balancing its quest for military security through its nuclear program with the need for food security.

John Burton (johnburtonft@yahoo.com), a former Korea correspondent for the Financial Times, is now a Washington, D.C.-based journalist and consultant.