Future multilateral cooperation with the DPRK: Food Security and agriculture

This report reviews the data on food security and agriculture in the DPRK. It investigates the meaning of the term ‘food security’ as understood by the DPRK government and the United Nations agencies working in the DPRK. The paper reviews the causes and condition of food insecurity in the DPRK. The paper charts the government’s responses to the food and economic crisis of the mid- 1990s, before evaluating food security in the DPRK in terms of aggregate national food availability as well as food accessibility by different social groups. The paper also notes the DPRK government’s new approach to moving towards a cooperation strategy with the international community based on development instead of relief. Building on this new approach, the paper proposes a set of recommendations designed to offer a multisectoral approach to reconstituting sustainable food security in the DPRK. In so doing, the paper offers suggestions for possible future multilateral cooperation in the context of food security as a policy goal for the DPRK

Mad, bad, sad or rational actor: Why the 'securitization' paradigm makes for poor policy analysis of North Korea

This article argues that the dominant paradigm for understanding and explaining north Korean domestic and international politics is in crisis. The dominant securitization paradigm is divided into its 'bad' and 'mad' elements and is derived from the crudest of Cold War politics and theories. The paradigm no longer provides a useful frame of reference for international policy-makers having to 'do business' with North Korea. The intervention of the humanitarian community in north Korea since 1995 has shown the obsolescence of the securitization paradigm and provided the foundation for two alternative approaches-the 'sad' and the 'rational actor' conceptual framework. The article concludes by arguing for the utility of a historicized and contextualized rational actor model which, it is argued, offers a realistic underpinning for international policies that seriously wish to promote peace, stability and freedom from hunger on the Korean peninsula

Overcoming humanitarian dilemmas in the DPRK (North Korea)

This report examines the diversity of humanitarian agency responses to working in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK)—north Korea—and proposes a set of recommendations for agencies and governments

How South Korean Means Support North Korean Ends: Crossed Purposes in Inter-Korean Economic Cooperation

North and South Korea share the same political and strategic aim of integration and eventual unification of Korea, although they remain divided in their understanding of what should be the specific nature of the unified Korea. Both states, in their own ways, use the same instruments of unification policy; these are military deterrence, political diplomacy,economic cooperation, and humanitarian assistance. Economic cooperation and humanitarian assistance provide the main instruments of inter-Korean cooperation, albeit in an unequal manner as it is South Korea that provides the major funding for cooperation projects. The paper evaluates whether South Korea receives economic or political value for money in its expenditure on inter-Korean cooperation. This is not therefore an argument about the military and political instruments of the unification strategies of North and South but instead remains focused on the nature and modalities of economic cooperation. My thesis is that economic instruments are being used for cross-purposes and that this should matter to South Korea as it is unwittingly helping North Korea achieve aims which it does not share, and, as a logical consequence, weakening its ability to achieve its own unification goals. I argue that South Korean means need to be re-calibrated with South Korean ends. I also argue that the South Korean unilateral approach to economic cooperation, while beneficial in opening up relations with the North, has now run its course. A determined complementary strategy of economic and humanitarian multilateralism will enable it to pursue its own agenda at the same time as supporting the moral imperative, shared by the majority of South Korea’s electorate of every political hue, of assisting the impoverished North Korean population in the short-, medium- and long-term

Nutrition and Health in North Korea: What’s New, What’s Changed and Why It Matters

Article Type: Research Paper Purpose: To examine the changing health and nutritional status of the North Korean population since the famine of the mid-1990s and the dominant perspective that little has changed since in the DPRK. Design, Methodology, Approach: Using hitherto neglected data from major international organizations, this research charts the little-known changes in patterns of food availability and food accessibility in aggregate, national terms, with some disaggregation of the data by gender and age. The DPRK is compared to other poor countries, other Asian countries and near neighbors in East Asia. Findings: Despite a precarious economy, the end of systematic food provision by the government, and a decline in aid from international organisations after 2001, the data shows that by the mid-2010s, national levels of severe wasting, an indication of famine-like conditions in the population, were lower than in other low income countries globally and lower than those prevailing in other developing countries in East Asia and the Pacific. Poverty and ill-health remained – as shown especially in terms of maternal health and infant mortality – but the incidence of malaria sharply declined and although the incidence of tuberculosis was up, the numbers of fatalities from both malaria and TB sharply declined. Practical Implications: This research contributes to a shift in North Korean Studies from securitized, opinion-based discussions in which North Koreans are either ‘victims or villains’, and which very often obscures or ignores mundane but important facts on the ground, towards careful, qualified, data-based analysis of societal change in the post-famine era of marketization in the DPRK. Originality, Value: The research shows that post-famine DPRK is not the outlier state that is commonly presented in scholarly, policy and global media analysis

Some calculations on the ground and lowest-triplet state of the helium isoelectronic sequence with the nucleus in motion

The method described in the preceding paper for the solution of two-electron atoms, which was used to calculate the 1 1S and 2 3S states of helium and heliumlike atoms within the fixed-nucleus approximation, has been applied to the case where all three particles are in relative motion. The solutions in the present case automatically include the effects of the mass polarization term and are compared with the results obtained for the term by using first-order perturbation theory with the fixed-nucleus wave functions. The input data for a particular atom consist of the atomic number, as before, but now the corresponding mass of the nucleus must be given also. Nonrelativistic energies with the nuclear mass included in the calculation have been obtained for the 1 1S and 2 3S states for Z ranging from 1 to 10. The energy with the nucleus in motion can be expressed only to eight significant figures (SF's) given the accuracy with which the relevant physical constants are known at present. All the results given here are computed as if these constants were known to ten SF's so that errors not incurred due to rounding. Convergence of the energies to ten SF's for both the singlet and triplet state was reached with a matrix of size 444 for Z values from 2 to 10. Convergence for the H- ion was a little slower