North Korea needs to restructure its agriculture to eradicate food shortages that resulted from failed reforms and may have killed millions, a South Korean analyst said. Lee Seong-hee, director-general of the National Institute of Crop Science, also told Reuters the South Korean government must support its own rice industry to minimise the fall-out from talks with rice-exporting countries that want Seoul to open its market.
Drought and typhoons devastated food production in North Korea in the mid-1990s, and the communist country has depended on international aid to help feed it 22 million people.
"We consider famine and mass death through the famine to be because of their poor food production," Lee said, outlining the standard explanation for the North's shortages. "The real cause of famine and mass deaths of North Koreans is really the regime."
His analysis of North Korean agriculture over nearly a decade showed the food deficit had remained constant at about two million tonnes each year because farm reforms had failed.
"To feed North Koreans properly it would only require $100 million to buy one million tonnes of food deficit from overseas," he said, noting the other one million tonnes comes from aid.
He said information on reform was scant. Infrastructure such as irrigation and drainage remained very weak. That was compounded by fertiliser and pesticide shortages and meant the little arable land available was vulnerable to natural disasters.
North Korea had tried three farm reforms - increasing wages and prices of commodities in 2002, legalising and renovating farmers markets in 2003 and experimenting with private farms in addition to state-owned farms this year, Lee said.
"Those measures to renovate the agricultural system have not been effective," he said. "It should give more incentives to private farmers, change the production system."
CRUCIAL SOURCE: Lee's institute, south of Seoul, belongs to the state-run Rural Development Administration. In addition to its domestic research, it provides seed and farming technologies to the North, usually through charities.
Aid workers estimate at least one million people in the North died of starvation because of natural disasters and because Pyongyang diverted scarce resources to develop weapons of mass destruction, including the nuclear arms programme at the centre of a long-running diplomatic crisis.
Lee said some three million people may have died.
North Korea needs 6.3 million tonnes of food this year, he said, quoting official data. Pyongyang produced 4.25 million tonnes of food, mainly rice and corn, last year.
On the growing potato-farming sector in North Korea and its efforts to attract foreign investments, Lee said Pyongyang needed to improve storage and transport. North Korean leader Kim Jong-il has identified the potato as a crucial food source for the North.
In contrast to hunger-stricken North Korea, South Korea needs to cut production of the major staple rice under its World Trade Organisation commitments.
Lee urged Seoul to provide more support to farmers because of the industry's social and environmental value. He said the government should offer concessions on other commodities or areas and help develop attractive high-value rice types.
Under the WTO agreement, Seoul has been in bilateral talks with nine rice-exporting countries since May, and based on the talks results, Seoul will have to free imports from 2005 by having tariffs in place or by raising import quotas.
Local farmers fear any opening of the rice market could kill their industry because domestic rice costs about five times as much as equivalent foreign rice.