North Korea, detailing its food shortage for the first time, has announced that it is short 2.3 million tons of grains needed to feed its people this year. The country harvested only 2.5 million tons in 1996 because of devastating floods. North Korea appealed to world governments for food. The Rome-based U.N. World Food Program estimates that North Korea has only enough food to last until late spring or early summer.

Easing the forty-seven-year U.S. trade embargo on North Korea, the Clinton administration allowed nongovernmental organizations to provide humanitarian food aid to the country. U.N. officials said that the North Korean government a few months ago reduced the amount of food provided by the state-run ration system from about 14 ounces daily per person to 3 1/2 ounces. (Refugees in U.N.-supported camps in Africa and elsewhere receive 22 ounces of rations a day.)

Karen Elliott House, president of Dow Jones International, in the Wall Street Journal calls on the U.S. administration "to stop extending the death throes [of the dying North Korean regime] with pills of promised aid and placebos of diplomatic dialogue." She points out that North Korea’s economy has been shrinking for seven years, its people are now limited to one bowl of rice a day, and the regime is warning of impending starvation. U.S. intelligence sources claim that North Korea’s fuel shortages have required its air force to curtail exercises, stalled the army’s tanks, and left industry operating at 20 percent of capacity. An Oregon state senator who recently visited Pyongyang reported blackouts in the government guest house, a sign that things are so tough even pretenses can’t be maintained.

Thus far, Pyongyang has steadfastly refused to embrace reform, despite negative economic growth every year since 1990 and a largely nonfunctioning formal economy. The latest upheavals in the top leadership—the rise of military generals at the expense of technocrats who have made some efforts at reform—bode ill for the prospects of change. Leading ideologist Hwang Jang-yop, who defected in Beijing on February 12, largely shaped Pyongyang’s official philosophy of juche (self-reliance), but even he appears to have concluded that the ascendant military hawks are harmful, both to the country and to himself. His flight is bound to render other would-be "reformers" vulnerable.

On February 21 Hong Song-nam, 73, one of several deputy premiers, was appointed acting prime minister. He is a Czech-trained engineer who has held mainly economic posts, and was chief planner in 1986-88. It is not clear whether he favors economic reform. His predecessor, Kang Song-san, had been out of action owing to ill health for over a year. At 65, Kang was younger than most Korean leaders. He was regarded as proreform; during his earlier premiership, from 1984 to 1986, Kang oversaw the first joint venture law and a partial repayment of Western bank debts. Thereafter, as governor of North Hamgyong Province, he laid the groundwork for the country’s only free economic zone, Rajin-Sonbong, promulgated in 1991. Expectations of further reform were thus high when Kang was reappointed premier in late 1992. These were not fulfilled.

The funeral committee for the late defense minister, Choe Gwang, who died of a heart attack on February 21, strongly suggests that soldiers are displacing civilian technocrats at the center of power. (In the absence of due process in North Korea, funeral committees offer valuable pointers on the rise and fall of individuals and groups.) Real power now lies with a trio of marshals who have shot up in the ranks: the head of the secret service, the head of the air force and political director of the Korean People’s Army (KPA), and the chief of the general staff. Several leading technocrats with reformist leanings were not on the funeral list, and have therefore presumably lost their party rank. In general, North Korea’s military leaders can be assumed to be even more narrow-minded than the Pyongyang norm (few have ever traveled abroad), and are likely suspicious of reform, since peace would threaten the huge military budget.

This is why many pundits react cautiously to suggestions that 1997 could be the year that Pyongyang finally allows some degree of marketization and opening of its economy. Rumors that de facto family farming will be tolerated owing to the agricultural crisis do little to support such predictions.