For over 15 years, North Korea has been one of the world’s largest recipients of food aid. Last week, however, it emerged that the isolationist state may be exporting an increasing amount of food to China.

The South Korean-based NK News website reported that Chinese customs data shows the quantity of North Korean food imported to China has risen by 35% this year.



In 2011, the United Nations found that about two-thirds of the North Korean population relied on government food rations distributed twice a month. In the following year, the state-run Korean Central News Agency reported that North Korean premier Choe Yong Rim had visited farms to highlight “the importance of settling the food shortage in building a thriving nation”.



Nearly a third of North Korean children under the age of five exhibit signs of stunted growth due to malnutrition, the UN said in June 2012.



Due to the lack of uncontested data, it is hard to know the country’s current agricultural output. A UN mission looking into the country’s food security status last year found that overall crop production over 2013/2014 was likely to grow by around 5%.



It also determined, however, that the “majority of households in [North Korea] have borderline or poor food consumption” and that the total food deficit for the year would amount to around 40,000 tons.



The UN’s predictions of 2014 crop production increases may not have been realised, due to severe droughts earlier this year.



Yet the food exports to China are not only reported to take the form of some high-end items like seafood and ginseng, but also a small amount of rice. China has traditionally been North Korea’s major food donor, providing 60, 724 tons of maize, soybeans and rice over 2012/2013.



NK News claims that over the first eight months of this year, “North Korea exported more food than it received in food aid in the whole of 2011”.



North Korean expert Marcus Noland, a Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, notes in a recent blog post that “the two-way trade in rice presumably reflects market forces and incentives”.

He writes that North Korea’s food exports have previously been interpreted as a sign of a regime desperate for foreign exchange. He suggests, however, that the reported rise in rice exports may just show that “internal prices for rice have stabilised”.

He also floats the idea that North Korea may not have “resolved issues with regulation of the internal grain trade and infrastructure problems: one sells the grain in China because one either cannot sell it at home, or the infrastructure is so bad one cannot get it to the markets where the high income consumers shop.”



North Korea’s critics expressed concern at the news of the food exports. “The obvious question this raises is whether North Korea has food to spare when aid workers are pleading with other governments to contribute aid for North Korea’s hungry,” wrote Joshua Stanton on the One Free Korea blog. “The best available evidence tells us that it does not.”

