Abstract
The great North Korean famine, known as the “Arduous March,” occurred in the mid-1990s. Many researchers agree that land degradation or declining land productivity represented a critical factor in triggering the famine. In North Korea, land degradation constitutes an issue that is difficult to evaluate given the complex relationship between social and ecological causes and lack of available information. In order to reflect this complexity and uncertainty, an agent-based modeling approach can be used. This study aims to develop an agent-based model to present the process and relationship between land degradation and food shortage in North Korea. The model replicates the social-ecological system of a hypothetical farm that represents collective farms in North Korea. The model consists of three parts: the human agent, environmental system, and policy and external factors. The agent is defined as a household, 400 of whom represent a collective farm in North Korea. If these agents experience an event, such as a food shortage, they will alter their land-use and labor strategy. The environmental system is defined as a 250 × 250 multi-layered grid, and the size of each grid is 100 m2 to reflect the size of a collective farm. The policy and external factors are comprised of three scenarios that reflect a land-use restriction policy, foreign relationship (food aid), and climate change. The simulation result indicates that the food crisis in the model would occur about 35 years after 1960 when the “Arduous March” occurred in the real world. The results of this study show the threshold and emergence point, corresponding with the vulnerability to land degradation and food shortage.
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Notes
- 1.
This landscape is known as “the location with back to the mountain and facing the water (배산임수 in Korean, 背山臨水 in Chinese letters)”. There is above 70% mountainous region in Korean Peninsula. Moreover, Korean has experienced harsh cold northwesterly wind and little precipitation in every winter, and fluctuating monsoonal rainfall in every summer. For these reasons, the most important aspects for location of a village in Korean Peninsula are mountain in the north for the shelter from the chilly wind and stream not far from there for water supply.
- 2.
The first test simulation labor times for 100 m2 were 6 h (rice) and 8 h (other farm), by Statistics South Korea (there being no such a data in North Korea). However, this time setting caused no changes. We concluded that this setting is not applicable to North Korea due to its lack of technology and energy. We have increased these numbers and found appropriate numbers for simulating North Korea.
- 3.
Through many trial simulations, we confirmed that the model farm system is unrecoverable if the population decreases by more than half. However, we also found that simulation speed slowed down dramatically in this situation. For this reason, we unwillingly set the endpoint at which half of the population is lost.
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Acknowledgments
This study is supported by the “4-Zero Land Space Creation Group” at Seoul National University, and Institute for Peace and Unification Studies (IPUS) at Seoul National University under the project “Laying the Groundwork for Unification.”
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An, Y., Park, S.J. (2020). An Agent-Based Model for Simulating Land Degradation and Food Shortage in North Korea. In: Carmichael, T., Yang, Z. (eds) Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the Computational Social Science Society of the Americas. CSSSA 2018. Springer Proceedings in Complexity. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35902-7_6
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