This week, the BBC has been carrying reports from the world’s most authoritarian and impenetrable state. The headline: its people are starving. Communist North Korea is destitute, even as capitalist South Korea is one of Asia’s most prosperous nations. It starved in the 1950s, 1970s and 1990s, and was rescued by China. But the government closed the border during Covid and it has barely reopened, hampering the import of Chinese foodstuff. UN experts reckon that North Korea can this year feed barely three-quarters of its 26 million people at survival level. The BBC has spoken to people who have witnessed neighbours dying of starvation in their homes and on the streets. More than half a million perished in the 1990s famine. This could be repeated.
What should Britons do about this, beyond offering distant sympathy? Hazel Smith, Korea expert at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, regularly points out that when a country is so set on xenophobic “self-sufficiency” and spends wildly on defence, it suffers massive economic distortions. Food shortage is “baked into the … system”. China’s exports to North Korea were reportedly down 81% in 2020. Shops are empty of Chinese food and beggars are everywhere.
That the Pyongyang regime should have sought self-sufficiency may have been wrong-headed but was not in itself stupid. As Smith told the BBC this week, what was disastrous was the tightening of UN sanctions in 2017. They extended a ban on nuclear and military materials so that it no longer differentiated between civilian and military needs. In particular, a stop was imposed on oil-based products, including everything needed for agriculture. This includes the inputs for producing fertilisers, pesticides and plastic sheeting. A year’s fuel consumption in the North is now down to the equivalent to one day’s consumption in the South. Food production since 2019 has plummeted, while the collapse in exports has severely limited North Korea’s ability to buy food on world markets.
Perhaps sanctions enthusiasts will say this is proof that “sanctions are working”. If a nation tolerates a viciously authoritarian leader who is a menace to neighbouring countries, they get what they deserve. Every time the North Korean leader, Kim Jongun, tests another missile, he deserves another sanction. That should teach him. A former imperial power such as Britain, self-appointed moral policeman to the world, cannot just do nothing. It can still punch above its weight. It can lead the west in demanding sanctions.
But sanctions hurting is not sanctions working. They were first imposed on North Korea after the 1950s war. They were strengthened in the 1980s, and tightened when North Korea left the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons in 2003. They were further tightened after successive weapons tests by Pyongyang in 2006, 2009, 2013, 2016 and 2017. I can find no shred of evidence that they have resulted in the slightest restraint on the Pyongyang regime, rather reinforcing its siege mentality and making it ever more reckless. This has served no one’s interest – not the west’s or Korea’s Asian neighbours.
Sanctions against North Korea have done exactly what they have done to countless regimes in recent decades, from Cuba to Myanmar and Venezuela to Afghanistan. They have entrenched existing elites in power, making them ever more paranoid in their behaviour. They weaken a country’s tolerance of dissent and reduce the likelihood of any change. Enthusiasts always say they take time. They have had time. These sanctions have failed for half a century.
Above all, their sheer crudity, enforced year after year, hurts and disempowers the poor and the innocent in the victim country. In the case of energy sanctions against Russia, they also hurt the poor of the imposing countries. They have become just another manifestation of the outbreak of global protectionism. We can assume that British taxpayers will now be asked to send food aid to Korea, to relieve a famine their governments have spent six years contributing towards. They will be right to do so. But our foreign policy has forgotten the maxim that if you cannot do good, at least do no harm. Sanctions do no good, but they are certainly doing harm.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist