Ever since seeing the documentary Team America: World Police I’ve had trouble taking North Korea’s dictator seriously. Even after seeing him manipulate all those Hollywood actors to do his evil bidding. Those goofy glasses and his bravura performance singing “I’m so lonely” in an Elmer Fuddish style cracked me up. I never have understood why he agreed to be in the film.
Well, I guess he showed me and all those other sniggerers a thing or two by setting off a nuke and launching a few Ding Dong missiles. Didn’t do a lot for the Japanese yen, either, which fell partly, folks in the markets said, to the fear that one of these Dongs could fall onto the skinny country. Also not great for the mood in South Korea, a country the communist north is still officially at war with and which he’s threatening to attack.
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Generally, this is not a good thing.
Oddly, it may help the world grain situation. Even help get rid of some Canadian grain. That’s because many analysts think all this ICBM-rattling by dictator Kim is his way of getting attention. He’s throwing a tantrum. (I have a 19-month old daughter. I hope she isn’t able to get her hands on any nukes when she starts throwing tantrums. That must be a real worry for Russian fathers: so many loose nukes over there.) He needs aid, including food to stop his proletariat starving.
In the past, food aid organized by the Canadian Foodgrains Bank has gone to the dark north, so that’s been a useful way of getting some grain out of the world’s stockpiles. So if a few hundred thousands tonnes or  million or two end up flowing to North Korea as a way of ending this tantrum, that’d be a good thing. The world’s still got a lot of grain to get rid of before the new crop comes in.
If Kim isn’t kidding, and is actually planning to go nuclear, that’s a bad thing all around. Not just for people, but for grain too – and the farmers who grow it. Japan, which lies close to North Korea, could either be the target of Kim’s, or the accidental recipient of a U.S. bound North Korean missile gone off course, is a big buyer of high-priced Canadian wheat and canola. They pay top dollar. If Kim starts lobbing nukes at the U.S., well, they’re the buyer of everything we grow and raise. South Korea is a buyer of Canadian grains and beef. Wait a minute . . . they don’t buy beef any longer. Ever since BSE they’ve refused to buy Canadian beef, even though they’ve relaxed their ban on U.S. beef.
That’s made federal ag minister Gerry Ritz haul South Korea to the WTO woodshed for “consultations,” or some other euphemism for a spanking. Hey, a paranoiac voice whispers into my ear, what if Gerry and Kim are in cahoots, and Kim’s putting pressure on South Korea so that Gerry – a la Lester B. Pearson with the Suez Crisis – swoops in and resolves it? Perhaps the South Koreans would be so grateful they’d open their doors to Canadian beef, and we’d send a bit of freebie wheat to the north for the favour. No, that’s just plain insane talk, I tell this crazy person who suggested that. That as silly as the conspiracy theories in The Da Vinci Code.Â
But this crisis, as I’ve watched it unfold over recent days, has made me aware of just how involved farmers’ markets are in geopolitical tensions that have nothing to do with wheat, canola, beef or pork. Here North Korea, South Korea, Japan, China and the United States are all embroiled in crisis, and they’re all markets for prairie farmers.
So perhaps in future I won’t smirk and snigger so glibly at dictator Kim’s goofy glasses and singing. Perhaps that’s why he’s doing this. Every since Team America was released, he’s probably been trying to find a way to make himself seem less silly, more scary. Blowing up a nuke might seem to him like a good way to do that.
