Food Aid Should Not Be Up for Contemplation

Christopher Hill is wrong in presenting the withholding of food aid to North Korea as a choice between short-term humanitarian aid versus medium-term strategic outcomes. There are moral and unification reasons why food aid should not be used as a tool in edging the North Korean regime towards collapse. First, it is simply unjust to let a population repressed the mismanagement (put kindly) of an authoritarian regime suffer further from malnutrition. Second, and related, the North Koreans will remember the moral stance of South Korea in history when unification eventually comes. The political and economic integration of the Korean peninsula will be orders of magnitude more difficult than Germany in 1991. Thus one of the strongest available links in preserving a future, new unified state will be the common identity of a people with shared culture and ethnicity, and with a record of helping the weak when they were helpless. It would be enormously difficult for the common North Korean to participate in the same polity as a South Korean if he or she remember that the South allowed the North to starve. Given that the "scar" of division, not just in Korea but in other countries such as China, has endured and is remembered decades after the Second World War, the memory of history will have a crucial role to play.