The Impact of Sanctions on Humanitarian Assistance to the DPRK

The impact of sanctions on humanitarian assistance [1]

It is well understood that United Nations sanctions have caused difficulties for humanitarian assistance providers to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, more commonly known as North Korea). These difficulties are not trivial and the comparatively small amount of humanitarian assistance to the DPRK, in global terms, could be boosted by administrative simplification of sanctions implementation. Such changes, however, cannot address the scale of humanitarian need in North Korea today; precipitated by the dramatic decline in domestic food production that began in 2018, continues unabated, and is largely a product of the expanded UN sanctions regime of 2016 and 2017. The major but little-known impact of United Nations sanctions has been to reimpose the threat of starvation last seen nearly three decades ago, when famine killed up to half a million North Koreans.[2]

This paper starts with a ground clearing exercise. It shows that there is no correlation between UN sanctions and changes in the volume of humanitarian support. The next section of this report shows how UN sanctions have had a negative impact on the delivery of humanitarian assistance to the North Korean population. The paper then shows how and why the expansion of UN sanctions of 2016 and 2017 precipitated a new need for humanitarian support. 

The policy corollary of this report is that, should the 2016 and 2017 sanctions be suspended, North Korea would once more be able to feed the population from domestic production and the current food emergency, in which we see credible reports of starvation, could be largely ameliorated.  Such policy actions would not alleviate all socioeconomic need in North Korea, whose population is one of the poorest in the world by almost any criteria, but, if past practice is anything to go by, would prevent further deaths from malnutrition related disease and starvation.

The non-correlation between UN sanctions and humanitarian assistance

In response to the nuclear and missile programme, the UN imposed sanctions on the DPRK in 2006. Initially, UN sanctions targeted individuals and institutions associated with the military, defence, and nuclear sectors, broadly construed. In 2016 and 2017, sanctions were expanded so that they instituted economy wide prohibitions to trade that no longer distinguished between civilian and the military economies. By the end of 2017, all the DPRK’s major exports were banned, and a total ban had also been imposed on key strategic imports including machinery, vehicles and natural gas. The 2017 sanctions also imposed severe quantitative caps on oil imports; crude oil imports were capped at 4 million barrels per year while the import of refined petroleum products was capped at 500,000 barrels a year. 

Figure 1 shows total humanitarian aid to the DPRK by year. Figure 1 does not, however, demonstrate a direct correlation between the UN sanctions regime and the volume of humanitarian assistance to the DPRK, either before or after the change in 2016 from targeted to comprehensive sanctions.

Figure 1: Humanitarian funding to the DPRK 1995-2023

Sources:

• 2000-2023 totals from https://fts.unocha.org/countries/118/flows/2000 
• 1995-1999 calculated from UN documentation and summarised in Smith. 2005. 114-116
• 1995 from United Nations Consolidated UN Inter-agency Appeal 1 July 1996 - 31 March 1997. Annex 3. Food Aid only.
• 1995 South Korean government data from Gyubin Choi. 2022.                   
• The Provision of Humanitarian Assistance to North Korea through Multilateral Cooperation. CO22-21. Seoul. KINU.

NB:                                                      

• figures rounded to the decimal point                       
• Recording became more systematic after 1998 when the emergency became protracted
• Between 1995 and 1997 established NGO inputs were recorded but smaller NGO activity was often not captured.
• 1998 and 1999 figures include NGO aid                                
• 1998 and 1999 cover calendar years                        
• 1999 from two UN consolidated Appeals for April 1997- March 1998.       
• 1996 figure from UN consolidated Appeal 1 July 1996–30 March 1997.     
• 1995 figure comprising US $130 million from the South Korean government and  
• a total of 30 million USD from Japan, Switzerland, WFP, UNICEF, IFRC, Interlife and Caritas.

UN sanctions did not prevent increases in humanitarian assistance between 2006 and 2013. Similarly, the fall in humanitarian aid to just under 40 million USD after 2014, remaining at that level until 2021 when it fell again, does not directly correlate with the expansion of the UN sanctions regime in 2016 and 2017.

The main reason for the fall in humanitarian assistance after 2014 was that humanitarian agencies did not consider that a humanitarian emergency existed in the DPRK and had not done so since the mid 2000s. United Nations agencies had worked in the DPRK since the famine years of the 1990s and remained concerned about human development issues, given the overall poverty of the country, but did not consider the DPRK a humanitarian priority compared to acute emergencies in other parts of the world. 

UN sanctions as constraint on the delivery of humanitarian assistance to North Koreans

The best-known constraint on the delivery of humanitarian assistance to the North Korean population is the inability of humanitarian organisations to find an international bank to process payments in and out of the DPRK.[3] The "banking channel" issue is not primarily, however, a product of UN sanctions but of US bilateral sanctions that impose penalties on international banks that deal with the United States (almost all of them) should they do business with the DPRK. The main constraint on humanitarian delivery provided by the UN sanctions regime itself, however, is the bureaucratic process, which functions so as to deter any but the most determined (and well-funded) efforts to deliver humanitarian assistance to the DPRK.[4] 

All humanitarian assistance agencies, from large UN agencies, like UNICEF, to small NGOs, must apply for a "humanitarian exemption" in order to deliver humanitarian aid to North Korea. The process of applying for "humanitarian exemptions" does not rely on demonstrating that the organisation wishing to deliver assistance is credible, experienced, and competent or that it can demonstrate that it has identified genuine humanitarian need of vulnerable North Koreans. 

Instead, the process relies on the applicant organisation filling in forms that literally require every item of the aid package, down to nails, screws and washers, to be ascribed a cost, purchase origin, purpose, material (e.g. metal, PVC) and distribution. Each of the normally hundreds of components of an aid package, some of which are very small, e.g. water buckets and lids, must be ascribed a shipping date, shipping method, shipping route, identifiable party (e.g. the manufacturer) and payment method.

The idea is that the humanitarian organisation must prove that every item — e.g. nail, screw, bucket, blood pressure machine — is not going to be diverted to the DPRK’s nuclear programme.

All this means that a single aid project, such as, for example, the package delivered by the United States NGO, the Christian Friends of Korea, (CKS) must be supported, in writing, by literally several thousand pieces of micro information, before it can even be considered for a "humanitarian exemption". The CKS application is appended as an example in the note below, as it is too large to be reproduced in an appendix.[5]   

Only 34% of the total amount of 120 million USD the United Nations considered necessary for humanitarian assistance was funded in 2019. Some of the shortfall was due to donor unwillingness to fund DPRK assistance programmes but the difficulties in navigating the “humanitarian exemption” system did not encourage humanitarian initiatives. From 2020, the DPRK’s refusal to allow foreigners into the country added further obstacles to aid delivery. Figure 1 above demonstrates the continued reduction in the volume of humanitarian aid to the DPRK in 2023. 

The banking channel constraints are significant in that they put individual aid workers in jeopardy; aid officials resorted to carrying thousands of euros in cash in and out of North Korea to pay for operating expenses. The bureaucratic burden is onerous as it is time consuming and expensive; all the extra administrative work must be funded. As of 17 July 2022, 25 humanitarian exemptions were current, mainly from United Nations agencies that had the capacity to absorb extra expense.[6] Improvements of course could be made to the humanitarian exemption process, but such improvements are not likely given that there is no sign of political will to do so and every sign that the process itself is considered part of the overall effort to make life difficult for the DPRK government. This is so even though the purpose of humanitarian assistance is to support North Koreans and save lives, in lieu of the demonstrable incapacity of the DPRK government to do so.

United Nations sanctions and return of food emergency 

By far the major impact and by far the least known consequence of UN sanctions on the DPRK has been to precipitate a food emergency for millions of North Koreans already suffering from an incompetent and increasingly authoritarian government.[7] Expanded UN sanctions in 2016 and 2017 completely banned or severely restricted DPRK imports of essential items for agricultural production. These new expanded sanctions also banned most DPRK exports, inevitably limiting export earnings needed to buy legal imports such as food.

The United Nations ranks the DPRK as the 16th poorest of 216 countries in the world in terms of GDP per capita per annum at 618 USD. Quantitative and qualitative research over the past 30 years of international organisation activity in the DPRK shows that most of the 25 million inhabitants have limited assets, generally poor living conditions and precarious income. One of the few success stories of the post-famine socio-economy, however, was that, from around 2008, DPRK domestic food production increased sufficiently to feed most of the population.[8]

Food and agriculture are socioeconomic sectors in which extensive, reliable data are available. The FAO and WFP provide authoritative data and analysis on DPRK food production, as does South Korea’s Rural Development Commission. The last in-country food and agriculture assessment from WFP and FAO, prior to the country closing its borders in January 2020, demonstrated that domestic food production fell sharply in 2018.[9] Credible reports have since showed a failure to resuscitate it.[10] In 2021 and 2022, for the first time since the famine years of the 1990s, reports of starvation reemerged in North Korea.

Why the 2016 and 2017 UN sanctions brought the return of food insecurity to North Koreans 

Agriculture in the DPRK, as everywhere in the world, is substantially dependent on oil products, which provide non-substitutable inputs for essential agro-industrial resources like fertilizer and pesticide production; transport of seed, crops, food and labour; fuel for irrigation and agricultural equipment. The DPRK is not an oil producer; the famine of the 1990s had been precipitated by the decision by China and Russia, unanticipated by the DPRK government, to charge market prices for oil exports and the consequent rapid decrease in oil exports to the DPRK. In the absence of cheap oil, spare parts, and machinery imports from their former Communist trading partners, DPRK domestic crop production collapsed, only recovering in the mid-2000s.

The UN oil sanctions of 2017 delivered a similar economic shock to that of the Chinese and Russian oil price hikes over two decades earlier. To provide context, the 2017 cap on refined petroleum product imports of 500,000 barrels per year is equivalent to less than one day’s consumption of those same products in South Korea. 

Initially, from 2006, that UN sanctions regime targeted the military and defence sectors. By contrast, the sanctions introduced in 2016 and 2017 were indiscriminate, affecting all sectors of the economy, including agriculture and food production. South Korea’s Bank of Korea estimates that, in 2019, agriculture comprised about 21% of the DPRK’s GDP, down from about 23% in 2018; if agro-industries like food processing, the production of fertilizer, agricultural chemicals, spare parts and machinery, and transportation are included, the proportion of GDP devoted to agriculture is, however, likely up to a third. Agriculture and food production were not exempted from the expanded sanctions.

The DPRK needs a minimum of around 5.5 million tonnes of grain to feed the population, calculated by FAO and the government at 1,700 calories per person per day. Figure 2 shows that agricultural production in the DPRK had started to fall in 2017/18 but that production fell precipitously in 2018/2019 so that the DPRK was 1.5 million tonnes short of the 5.755 million tonnes of grain it needed at survival levels. 

Figure 2: DPRK domestic grain production compared to minimum grain requirement (in 10,000 tonnes) 2015/16–2018/2019*

*The agricultural year runs over two calendar years. The main harvest is consumed the year after it is harvested.

Sources: 

• FAO GIEWS Update The DPRK, 27 April 2016, http://www.fao.org/3/a-i5572e.pdf;
• FAO GIEWS Special Alert No. 340, 20 July 2017,  https://openknowledge.fao.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/3a873411-6caf-4624-9529-f8d6253bfe27/content;
• FAO GIEWS Update 9 July 2018, http://www.fao.org/3/CA0363EN/ca0363en.pdf. Accessed 18 July 2022;
• FAO/ WFP DPR Korea Rapid Food Security Assessment, May 2019, https://docs.wfp.org/api/documents/WFP-0000104948/download/?_ga=2.78488084.1424705806.1718303528-1726016408.1718303528; All Accessed 13 June 2024.

From 2020, the FAO could not conduct in-country evaluations as the DPRK closed its border to foreigners from early 2020 as a response to the COVID pandemic. The DPRK government provided the FAO with food production figures of 6.65 million tonnes for the 2019 (agricultural year 2019/2020) main harvest and 4.9 million tonnes for the 2020 (agricultural year 2020/2021) main harvest.[11] These figures could not be verified by the FAO. The government figure for 2019 was certainly anomalous while the 2020 figure, while more realistic, is likely an overestimation. 

The figures provided by South Korea’s Rural Development Administration (RDA) for 2019 and 2020, whose modelling has historically proved accurate, are more useful. RDA figures show DPRK domestic food production at 4.64 million tonnes in 2019 and 4.4 million tonnes in 2020, 4.7 million tonnes in 2021, 4.5 million tonnes in 2022 and 4.8 million tonnes in 2023.[12] 

The immediate consequence of a fall in domestic food production is that the food import requirement increases. The FAO reports that between 2008 and 2013 DPRK grain import requirements were around 400,000 metric tonnes per year; between 2013-2014 and 2016-2017 they rose to an average half a million metric tonnes per year. These food deficit gaps were filled by a mix of commercial imports, some of which were recorded imports and some of which came into North Korea via the semi-legal marketised trade that flourished after the famine years of the 1990s. Figure 3 shows that in 2018 and 2019, however, the food import requirement increased to an unaffordable 1.5 million tonnes.

The large scale of the food gap should be emphasised. One million tonnes of grain cost about 1.48 billion USD on commercial markets in 2021. To emphasise the scale of the food gap it is worth noting that the amount of food aid necessary to fill that gap would have comprised more than the entire USAID emergency food assistance budget for 26 food emergencies round the globe in fiscal year 2019 and nearly half USAID’s total food aid budget for the entire globe in the same year.[13] 

Figure 3: Commercial food imports and food aid compared to grain deficits 2015-2019 (in 1000 metric tonnes)

1. USDA calendar year data are identical to FAO marketing year data.

2. USDA 2019 commercial food import data from China up to September 2019; from other countries to October 2019. Food aid data 2019 up to October 2019.

3. Compiled from United States Department of Agriculture Foreign Agricultural Service. 2020. DPRK Food Grains Situation Update in MY 2018-2019. Seoul. Global Agricultural Information Network; FAO grain data for 2015-2018. RDA for 2019.

Sources:

• United States Department of Agriculture Foreign Agricultural Service. 2020. DPRK Food Grains Situation Update in MY 2018-2019. Seoul. Global Agricultural Information Network.  https://www.fas.usda.gov/data/south-korea-dprk-food-grains-situation-update-my-2018-19, accessed 16 June 2024;
• FAO GIEWS Update The DPRK, 27 April 2016, http://www.fao.org/3/a-i5572e.pdf, accessed 16 June 2024;
• FAO GIEWS Special Alert No. 340, 20 July 2017, https://reliefweb.int/report/democratic-peoples-republic-korea/faogiews-special-alert-no-340-democratic-people-s-republic, accessed 16 June 2024;
• FAO GIEWS Update 9 July 2018, http://www.fao.org/3/CA0363EN/ca0363en.pdf, accessed 16 June 2024;
• FAO/ WFP DPR Korea Rapid Food Security Assessment, May 2019, https://docs.wfp.org/api/documents/WFP-0000104948/download/?_ga=2.115670726.1912732670.1718569190-1726016408.1718303528, accessed 16 June 2024;
• FAO. 2021. GIEWS Update. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Food supply and demand outlook in 2020/21 (November/October). Rome. FAO. 14 June. p. 7.  https://openknowledge.fao.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/76eda020-91e4-43f9-8d7a-a3e91e6ce688/content, accessed 16 June 2024;
• Rural Development Administration. 2020, DPRK Produces 4.4 Million Tons of Food Crop — Down by 240 Thousand Tons YoY [Press Release], December. https://www.rfa.org/english/news/korea/food-12212020203849.html#:~:text=The%20Rural%20Development%20Administration%20under,240%2C000%20tons%20from%20last%20year, accessed 16 June 2024.

The failure of DPRK government mitigation measures 

Figure 3 shows that the large food deficits of 2018 onwards were not filled by recorded commercial imports or food aid. There is some evidence to suggest that in 2019 and in 2020, food deficits were mitigated by possibly a million tonnes of food aid from China, not all of which showed up in official trade statistics. Household and government food stocks were also used. In 2019, North Koreans continued to engage in semi-legal trade across its 1000-mile border with China. The DPRK government also engaged in oil smuggling, assisted by Chinese government willingness to ignore such trading.

Almost 100% of North Korea’s trade is with China. As well as to constrain official trade, an important consequence of the 2020, 2021 and 2022 border closures was to handicap the semi-legal cross-border private trade that had provided a mainstay of the North Korean economy since the 2000s. Oil smuggling continued, most likely in exchange for DPRK coal exports that were officially banned by UN sanctions. Given the clandestine nature of the enterprise, it is not possible to assess the extent of these operations, although we do know from previous trading patterns between the two countries that premium prices for oil were likely to be charged by Chinese traders. Fuel (and fertilizer) assistance from China were likely provided on a mix of commercial and concessional terms.

Evidence exists of a reduced ability to make up food deficits from food imports. In 2021 no grain imports into the DPRK from China were recorded. In 2020 and 2021, food imports from China of sugar, flour and soyabean, already at a low level, were drastically reduced (in the case of flour to zero). As food harvests had not recovered, food imports were required but the export earnings necessary to pay for imports had fallen so far that they were statistically non-existent. China–DPRK trade (exports and imports) fell from 6 billion USD in 2016 to 320 million USD in 2021.

Impact of sanctions on humanitarian need 

Post-famine improvements in food accessibility were charted in successive national nutrition surveys conducted by UNICEF and WFP in collaboration with the DPRK government. Figure 4 shows absolute improvements in child malnutrition between 1998 and 2017. It also shows relative improvements as North Korean children, by 2017, were on average less likely to suffer from malnutrition than children in other poor counties in Asia and in some wealthier ones like India. Given insufficient food, continuing poverty, and six years of recession, it is unlikely that those gains have continued.

The most recent in-country FAO report summarising survey data, completed before the government closed its borders in 2020, stated that household level food access and diversity of diets had worsened to the extent that North Korean households faced "an overall alarming situation". [14] 

Figure 4: Child malnutrition in North Korea 1998-2017; in comparison with selected Asian countries

Source: UNICEF/WHO/WB.2021.Global expanded database Wasting (Survey Estimates, National and Disaggregated) April 2021; Global expanded database Stunting (Survey Estimates, National and Disaggregated) April 2021. https://data.unicef.org/topic/nutrition/malnutrition/, accessed 13 June 2024.

Compared to 2018, "the food security situation is clearly worsening… with poor food consumption rising and acceptable consumption diminishing."[15]

Coping mechanisms reported to the FAO in 2019 included spending savings, borrowing money, bartering and selling household goods and sending children to eat at relatives’ homes or in public institutions. These methods are not elastic. In a contracting economy, savings become depleted, debts need to be paid with interest, household goods are finite and, relatives and public institutions have reduced capacity to feed extra mouths. By 2022, given that the DPRK economy was in a sixth year of recession, it is likely that these coping methods were exhausted. 

UN response to humanitarian need after expanded sanctions implementation

Figure 1 shows that in 2020, after the UN humanitarian agencies had reported in 2019 from in-country data gathering and analysis that the population was at risk of starvation, the DPRK received only a tiny amount of international humanitarian assistance. Figure 5 shows this amount as compared to billions for Syria, South Sudan and Yemen. 

Figure 5: United Nations humanitarian assistance 2020

Source: UN OCHA. 2020. Humanitarian Action. Data extracted from online tables. https://humanitarianaction.info/overview/2020?bs=eyJibG9jay1hOGM1Y2MyNi00ZGZmLTQ5ZmUtYTk1Mi0zYjVkMmUyYzgzYTciOnsic29ydCI6eyJjb2x1bW4iOjEsImRpciI6ImFzYyJ9LCJzZWFyY2giOiIifSwiYmxvY2stMWNkYjliNTEtNGQ2MS00NDU2LWEzNzYtMjAxNTRiOTAzYzcwIjp7InNlYXJjaCI6IiIsInNvZnRfbGltaXQiOiJleHBhbmRlZCJ9LCJibG9jay00MGU2N2RmOS05YjIzLTQ2MWQtODJjMS01OTg0NDE3ODUxY2IiOnsic2VhcmNoIjoiIiwic29mdF9saW1pdCI6ImV4cGFuZGVkIn19. Accessed 16 June 2024. 

From 2021, the UN stopped including the DPRK in its annual humanitarian appeals. This meant that the UN no longer produced data on ongoing humanitarian need in the DPRK. The rationale given was that no information was available after the DPRK government closed its borders in 2020. This was despite the literally thousands of professional reports by UN agencies that had documented severe food insecurity in the DPRK for over 25 years. Indeed, the UN has extensive experience in working in conflict zones where it is impossible to gather data directly, such as in Sudan, Yemen and the DRC, and where it must rely on indirect data collection and analysis. All these methods would be equally possible in analysing humanitarian need in the DPRK.[16] The UN also acknoweldges that it is populations living under the aegis of poor governments that are most likely to need humanitarian assistance. 

UN sanctions and humanitarian assistance

In 1999, in the wake of research that showed indiscriminate UN sanctions had caused deaths of thousands of children in Iraq and Haiti, the UN Security Council unanimously agreed to conduct "regular assessment of humanitarian consequences for the population of the target state" of all future UN sanctions measures. After 18 years of UN sanctions on the DPRK, however, neither the UN Sanctions Committee nor the Member States have undertaken an assessment of the impact of sanctions on the North Korean population. 

The impact of sanctions on generating humanitarian need in North Korea is not well known. The UN Security Council reiterates that sanctions are not intended to cause harm to the population while the DPRK government refuses to admit economic incapacity and import dependency to the outside world, as it considers doing so would expose the country’s structural weaknesses. Both the "sender" and the "target" of UN sanctions, each for their own reasons, prefer to avoid drawing attention to the negative impact of sanctions on the North Korean population. Thus, a very unhappy coincidence of interest between the United Nations Security Council and the DPRK government combines to allow the immiseration of the North Korean population to continue unchecked and unrecorded. The 2016 and 2017 United Nations sanctions on the DPRK included the food, health and education sectors, as they no longer excluded the civilian economy. The last time such indiscriminate sanctions had been used as an instrument of UN policy was in Iraq and Haiti in the 1990s. Sanctions have not brought about denuclearisation. Far from it. Under sanctions, the North Korea nuclear and missile programme has accelerated. The political and economic isolation of the DPRK intended by the expansion of sanctions has also, quite predicably, driven the DPRK into an ever-tighter exclusive relationship with Russia and China, encouraging a more substantive relationship between these anti-democratic states. The major impact of sanctions has, however, been to engender a need for humanitarian assistance for those North Koreans least able to help themselves, including children, the sick, the frail elderly and the poor.

For more information and analysis see 

Hazel Smith. 2005. Hungry for Peace: International Security, Humanitarian Assistance and Social Change in North Korea (Washington DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2005), pp. 337. 

Hazel Smith. 2014. Crimes Against humanity? Unpacking the North Korean human rights debate. in Christine Hong and Hazel Smith (eds), Critical Asian Studies, Reframing North Korean Human Rights, Vol. 46, No. 1, March, pp. 127-143.

Hazel Smith. 2015. North Korea: Markets and Military Rule (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 381.

Hazel Smith. 2016. Nutrition and Health in North Korea: What’s New, What’s Changed and Why It Matters, North Korean Review, Vol. 12 No. 1, Spring, pp. 7-34.

Hazel Smith. 2020. The ethics of United Nations sanctions on North Korea: effectiveness, necessity and proportionality, Critical Asian Studies, Vol. 52 No. 2, pp. 182-203

Hazel Smith. 2021. Explaining Food Insecurity in North Korea: The Self-Sufficiency Fallacy. Global Asia. Vol 16. No. 3. September. https://globalasia.org/v16no3/cover/explaining-food-insecurity-in-north-korea-the-self-sufficiency-fallacy_hazel-smith

Hazel Smith. 2021. Sanctions and food insecurity in North Korea: Where next for international public policy (in Korean). KDI Review of the North Korean Economy, Vol 23. no.5. May. pp. 76-82.

Hazel Smith. 2022. The return of famine to North Korea? An evidence-based assessment of the economic and humanitarian impact of United Nation sanctions. Seoul. KDI.  in Korean. English version available on request to author.

Hazel Smith and Suk Lee. December 2023. International Humanitarian Aid to North Korea: Progress, Results, and Controversy. Seoul. KDI. 29 pp. https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/283602/1/1881026108.pdf. Accessed 13 June 2024.