The Foreign Service Journal, March 2012

F OCUS ON H UNGER AS A F ORE IGN P OL ICY I SSUE F EEDING THE O THER K OREA 22 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / M A R C H 2 0 1 2 e have all experienced the confused feeling that washes over us in the initial few seconds after waking up from a dream, right? Complete bewilderment is followed by a surge of relief that you’ve somehow narrowly escaped an unbelievable situation. As the only official American living in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea from 2004 to 2005, I wrestled almost daily with this fuzziness. I was there as the United Nations World Food Program representative, in charge of the largest feeding operation in the world. Considered the more successful of the two Koreas dur- ing the early postwar period, the North went into a steep decline following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Be- cause it mainly produced poor-quality finished goods for communist markets, its already limited manufacturing trade base evaporated. The country did, however, possess a range of raw materials that were in demand, so it traded ferrous metals, labor and other finished industrial prod- ucts for cereals. Only a small portion of the mountainous country is con- sidered arable, so North Korea has regularly faced food production deficits. This makes access to external cereal sources, principally China and the Soviet Union, essential. So once Pyongyang lost its Russian patron in the early 1990s, the situation rapidly began to deteriorate. Into the Hermit Kingdom My relationship with the “Hermit Kingdom” actually began in 1995. That was in the midst of a particularly tense period in U.S.-DPRK relations, when Pyongyang’s efforts to develop nuclear weapons accelerated. The greatest hope for slowing their progress was an in- strument called the Agreed Framework, signed on Oct. 21, 1994 — just a few months after Kim Il Sung, the na- tion’s founder, had died. The agreement laid out a step-by- step path toward normalization of relations between Washington and Pyongyang, but the pace of implementa- tion soon slowed. Then, early in 1995, reports began to emerge that North Korea faced a new crisis. Reliable information was F EW A MERICANS HAVE EVER VISITED P YONGYANG , LET ALONE LIVED AND WORKED THERE . H ERE IS A FIRST - PERSON ACCOUNT BY ONE WHO DID . B Y R ICHARD R AGAN Richard Ragan is currently the United Nations World Food Program representative in Tanzania and has served in the same capacity in Zambia, Nepal and North Korea. Prior to joining the U.N., he worked for Representative Les Aspin, D-Wis. During the Clinton administration he served successively in the Office of the Secretary of De- fense, on the National Security Council staff and as USAID’s deputy assistant administrator for humanitarian assistance.