Severe Famine in North Korea Substantiated by Johns Hopkins Study

TOKYO —  North Korea’s famine has been every bit as devastating as anecdotal reports have suggested, with the death rate in one area rising as much as eightfold since 1990 and the birthrate cut in half, according to a study to be published today.

The study is the first statistically rigorous assessment of a North Korean hunger crisis whose true dimensions have been carefully censored by the hermetic, Stalinist regime. The study was conducted by Johns Hopkins University demographers and a South Korean physician and appears in today’s editions of the British medical journal Lancet.

“There is very real evidence in our sample that famine is killing people,” said the lead author, Courtland Robinson, associate at the Center for Refugee and Disaster Studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health in Baltimore. “It is very grim.”

Journalists and aid workers have interviewed some of the estimated 50,000 to 150,000 North Koreans who have sneaked or bribed their way across the border into China, and have reported horrifying stories of starvation, social dislocation, and even sensational reports of cannibalism and the sale of young North Korean women.

However, it has been difficult to gauge how representative these anecdotal tales are or to accurately estimate how many people have died.

North Korea has suffered for four years from famine attributed both to natural causes such as drought and flooding and to the nation’s crippled socialist economic system. Estimates of the number of famine deaths have ranged from a few hundred thousand to as many as 3 million.

The authors of the Lancet report studiously avoided extrapolating from their data to estimate a national death toll. However, a calculation based on their data would indicate that 2.1 million of the 23 million North Koreans may have died from famine or related causes in the three-year period ending in 1997, in addition to the roughly 400,000 deaths that would have been expected in a population of that size during ordinary times.

The Lancet study was based on interviews with 440 North Korean migrants at 15 locations in China after they had crossed the border in search of food, money or medical help.

About 78% had come from North Hamkyong province, in the far northeastern corner of North Korea, an area that has been mostly off-limits to foreigners and that is believed to have been hard-hit by famine. They had traveled an average of 116 miles to China, mostly on foot.

To produce a more accurate picture, only adults were interviewed, no more than one member of each household was included in the survey and each person was asked to provide details about relatives he or she left behind.

Of the 440 households represented, 150 had seen the death of at least one member in the three years from 1995 through 1997.

The overall rate of death among these households per 1,000 people soared from 28.9 in 1995 to 45.6 in 1996 and 56 in 1997, the survey found. Meanwhile, births per 1,000 people plummeted from 13.3 in 1995 to 7 in 1997.

“Birth becomes the rare event, rather than death,” Robinson, the lead author, said in a telephone interview from Baltimore.

In China, by comparison, the death rate in 1990 was 6.7 per 1,000 people, while there were 22 births per 1,000 people despite the nation’s strenuous efforts to curb population growth.

In 1990, before the collapse of the former Soviet Union, North Korea’s main patron, and the ensuing economic woes, North Korea had reported a death rate of 5.5 per 1,000 people and a birth rate of 22 per 1,000, though some analysts believed those figures were suspiciously rosy, Robinson said.

Averaging the death rates and birthrates for the three years ending in 1997, deaths in the households sampled rose eightfold since 1990 and births were halved, Robinson said.

Most of the North Koreans interviewed had been in China for 10 to 30 days and said they intended to return home with food for their relatives. They consistently reported that serious punishment is meted out against those who are believed to have been disloyal in China and against the families of those who do not return, Robinson said.

North Koreans caught returning from China are typically subjected to what they called “light penalties”--15 days in jail at most and no penalty at all for children, elderly people or those with sufficient cash--provided that they can convince authorities that they had been in China for only a short period to get food and had always intended to return, the migrants said.

However, if authorities suspect that the returnee had attempted to buy a Chinese identity card, had made contact with foreigners--which is considered espionage--or had converted to Christianity, penalties can include 10 years in prison or worse, Robinson said.

Chinese authorities reportedly are stepping up deportations of North Korean migrants, many of whom are sheltered by relatives in China.

Those suffering the most in North Hamkyong province are not farmers but those who have no way to grow their own food, Robinson said.

One kindergarten teacher, a midlevel cadre with the ruling Korean Workers’ Party, said the number of children in her classroom had plummeted, apparently because their families were out looking for food.

The teacher said, however, that recently children had begun returning to school because the United Nations was feeding those who attend. Contrary to past reports that North Korea had tried fiercely to hide international aid from its population, the feeding program was announced on the radio to encourage school attendance, the kindergarten teacher told Robinson.

However, the teacher predicted that the number of pupils would not return to normal, as “even rich women have stopped having children.” The woman reported that the mothers, most of whom hailed from the elite, were using Chinese intrauterine devices for contraception.

“They are still too uncertain about the future,” she told Robinson.