A., mediante la cual se reforma la cláusula quinta del pacto

To see how these various constraints work in practice, it is useful to consider a typical WFP delivery.17 _{Following the appeal and commitments from donor}

governments, the WFP works with donors to orchestrate shipments, which land at North Korean ports. The WFP and FDRC agree on a delivery plan for each shipment, specifying the final distribution of aid by local jurisdiction and targeted group.

The WFP and FDRC meet the food at the port. The logistics of distribu- tion within North Korea, however, are handled not by the FDRC but by the Ministry of Food Administration, and the food ultimately passes through the public distribution system (Bennett 1999). As early as 1997, it became clear that limited trucking capacity and fuel shortages were a major constraint on effective delivery of food. The WFP offered the North Korean government fuel subsidies, but to keep track of food trucked to the county-level warehouses and to justify the subsidies, the WFP and the North Korean authorities developed a “consignment note system” to monitor shipments. The system used waybills in English and Korean that identified the contents of the shipment and its destination (Bennett 1999:12; GAO 1999:11–12). The North Korean authorities compile the waybills for a particular shipment. When delivery is complete, the waybills are returned to the WFP for the fuel reimbursement. The WFP in turn maintains a database of shipments.

The Aid Regime 103 The opportunities for leakage in such a system are multiple. Major diver- sion at the port is unlikely, but much food does not go from port to truck but rather to trains and barges before it is transferred to trucks; these shipments are not tracked. The staff in the WFP suboffices receive copies of the distribution plans. In principle, warehouse managers are supposed to receive copies of these as well. WFP staff have reported on a number of occasions their suspicions that much of the paperwork required by the WFP was fabricated ex post (Kirk and Hochstein 1997; Bennett 1999; Kirk, Brookes, and Pica 1998), although whether this was to hide diversion or simply reflected lack of administrative capacity is impossible to say. The WFP field offices attempt to check as many county warehouses as they have access to, and although access has been lim- ited, Bennett claims that through the peak of the famine there were “only very few occasions when consignments were not received as stated in the counties visited” (1999:12).

Nonetheless, there is at least anecdotal evidence of problems at this stage in the distribution chain. Kirk, Brookes, and Pica (1998), for example, report observing food donated by the European Union (EU) loaded onto a military truck with military personnel and headed toward a province not covered by the EU assistance program. Another example is recounted by Chin Yong-gyu, a former sergeant in the Korean People’s Army and driver (1998–2002), who described in detail how the military diverted foreign relief supplies and fooled UN monitors (International Federation for Human Rights 2003). Yet more recent incidents of this sort are provided by Good Friends (2005).

Once food reaches the county warehouse, the only check on delivery to the final institutional destinations—whether public distribution centers (PDCs) or targeted institutions—and on the use made of the food by those final destina- tions is through spot checks by WFP suboffices. Although large-scale diversion at higher stages in the distribution chain is possible, it is at this lower level of the chain that monitoring is the weakest and diversion thus most likely to occur. The task of tracking supplies across tens of thousands end-user institutions under difficult working conditions is vast. Ironically, some NGOs operating on a smaller scale may have a more accurate grasp of where their contributions are ending up, despite what appears to be less rigorous monitoring.

With approximately 43,000 ultimate destinations and the multiple restric- tions on monitoring, it is extremely difficult for the WFP and NGO leadership to say with certainty where food is going. We take up the issue of diversion in more detail in the following chapter, but a fascinating example is documented by Dammers, Fox, and Jimenez (2005). UNICEF maintains an EU-funded program to distribute therapeutic milk, which can be fatal if administered

104 DILEMMAS OF HUMANITARIAN ASSISTANCE

incorrectly. According to the 2003/2004 agreement, this milk was to be pro- vided to three provincial hospitals with properly trained staff. During a moni- toring visit in November 2003, however, the EU’s technical assistant discovered that the supplies were being distributed to baby homes in the cities of Hyesan and Ch’o˘ngjin. The DPRK then proposed for the 2004/2005 aid cycle that the product be distributed to 157 rehabilitation centers of various sorts, an altera- tion in terms of reference that Dammers, Fox, and Jimenez describe as without justification, cost-ineffective, and potentially dangerous.

Centrally directed conspiracies to divert aid may well exist,18 _{but our recon-}

struction of an aid shipment suggests that local politics are likely to play a more important role in the final distribution of food than are central government authorities. County-level administrators have substantial influence over the dis- position of aid supplies and face a host of motivations ranging from genuine and sincere differences with donors over priorities, to the universal local politics phenomenon of back-scratching, to personal pecuniary gain. The latter may be particularly important if we consider that these midlevel government and party officials are living on rapidly eroding won-denominated salaries, as we discuss in more detail in chapter 7.

According to interviews with WFP officials, staff members occasionally go to the PDCs and observe distribution to final aid recipients. Yet as one UN official put it, “We are not naïve. We have 300 monitoring visits a month. They don’t mean anything, because there are no random visits” (quoted in Flake 2003:37). Both U.S. and EU official monitors indicated “staging” and significant discrep- ancies between reported numbers of beneficiaries at particular institutions and those actually observed during the 1997–98 period. More important, refugee interviews suggest that there is diversion from the warehouse level to the army and privileged party personnel.