The Study Of Dprk’s Food Crisis And International Community’s Aid

At the beginning of1990s, DPRK suffered food crisis constantly. There were three reasons for the crisis. The first one is the disintegration of Russian and former socialist countries, DPRK couldn’t maintain close relations with them as before and consequently lost their trade relations and economic aid. The second one is the natural disaster and the great famine in DPRK. The third one is that because of a rigidified economic system and an unbalanced development strategy in DPRK. In order to alleviate the food crisis, DPRK appealed to international society and request for the aid. International society actively carried out aid activities through the multilateral and bilateral form, especially those countries which had great interests in the Korean peninsula, such as the United States, Japan, South Korea and other western countries, while China preferred to through the bilateral form.This paper mainly focused on DPRK’s food crisis and the international community’s aid. Paper concretely analyzed the causes of the food crisis in DPRK and point out that DPRK’s rigidified economic system and the unbalanced development strategy is the root cause of the food crisis. The food aid of the international society can only in some extent ease the crisis. To eliminate the food crisis, and the DPRK’s government should reform the current economic system. At the same time, this paper also analyzes the process of food aid provided to DPRK by international community and the cause and effect of the food aid. This paper points out that there is no purely humanitarian aid in the present international relations system and all the aids had an covered purpose. Specific to the main countries which provided food aid to DPRK, we can easily found that all these countries are trying to reach of their respective favorable political and security purposes. Food aid is just a kind of rewards and punishment method, which has been used to entice DPRK to act as international social expectations. But unfortunately, food aid as a political and diplomatic tool didn’t realize the political and security goals, which incurred a recipient of suspicion and boycott. Finally the paper points out that, to really help the DPRK solving the food crisis, international assistance should have to put economic aid and political decoupling, and recover the true colors of humanitarian aid.