PYONGYANG: The most predicable thing about North Korea is its unpredictability. One day last week saw the son of its “Dear Leader” Kim Jong Il arrested while entering Japan on a false passport (supposedly to take his son to Tokyo’s Disneyland), the next day brought a promise to maintain its moratorium on missile testing until 2003 as well as continue sales of missile technologies to countries like Iran. But there is a second, unchanging element in North Korean affairs: its basket-case economy.

One million people may have died in the North Korean famine of 1995 to 1997. Now the World Food Program fears that another famine is looming – the country’s agricultural output will likely fall to 1.8 million tons of grain, far short of the 4.8 million tons needed to supply the meagre ration of 7ounces a day (half the daily allowance for those in UN refugee camps) ordinary North Koreans receive. Making matters worse, national food stocks ran out in January and South Korean food aid will run out this month.

While the World Food Programme feeds North Korea's six million children, 17 million adults must fend for themselves. (A "military first" programme ensures diverts most supplies to North Korea’s huge standing army and bureaucracy.) To survive, many North Koreans forage for edible roots and leaves and make soups from cabbage stalks and vegetable waste. Those who survive will be more malnourished than ever, and the percent of children whose growth is stunted will increase from today’s two thirds.

North Korea’s next mini-harvest is not due until late June. But that harvest will not even be as good as last year’s abysmal one. At the same time, South Korea will reduce the amount of fertiliser it provides for rice planting from 300,000 tons to 200,000 tons. But even that reduced level of aid was disputed by people in Seoul, who argued that conditions on improved North/South relations needed to be attached.

These appalling conditions result from North Korea's bizarre form of socialism known as "juche.” Invented by Kim Jong Il’s father, North Korea’s current leader has continued to promote “juche” in almost 900 books and articles.

Despite shunning Marxism/Leninism in favour of "juche" in 1967, the Soviet subsidies kept North Korea’s economy above water until 1991. Weakened by the collapse of the USSR, the economy was sent into a tailspin after successive floods and droughts in 1995, 1996 and 1997. Although he avoids talking about it at home, even Kim Jung Il may now believe that "juche" is a losing philosophy. So he has turned to China for advice.

Specific "how to" advice is what Kim wants from China. During his first of two missions to China last year, Kim Jung Il asked President Jiang Zemin about how to move towards a market economy yet maintain an authoritarian dictatorship. My pleasure, said President Jiang. First, firmly suppress political dissent as soon as it emerges. Second, examine our stock exchanges and special economic zones. On his second trip to China, which followed Kim Jung Il’s historic meeting with President Kim Dae Jung of South Korea last June, North Korea’s leader was taken to Shanghai by Premier Zhu Rongji and shown its stock exchange and the vast Pudong development zone.

No one doubts that Jiang Zemin knows how to maintain an authoritarian regime. But is he the best source of advice on how to turn North Korea’s economy around? Probably not: North Korea is not China. The policies that transformed in China over the last two decades are unlikely to work in North Korea. It will be along time before the “Dear Leader” will be able to convince his followers that a stock market, with its demand for corporatization and even privatisation, is at all connected to the primary stage of "juche.” Convincing themselves that reform was unavoidable was one of the major feats of China’s leadership under Deng.

In China, economic zones – especially the five Special Economic Zones and the Pudong area of Shanghai – work because, from their inception, they were envisioned as laboratories for economic, social, and even political experiments. The main contribution of the zones was to experiment with market forces in a limited, and therefore politically acceptable, way before applying their lessons across the country.

Deng Xiao Ping, who gave the zones the go-ahead, understood that by opening China’s economy to the outside world, the zones would inevitably permit "mosquitoes" to fly into China. He accepted this risk as the price to be paid in order to improve the economic welfare of ordinary Chinese. He was right: mosquitoes did fly in, bringing corruption, criminal activities, progressive and liberal ideas and – perhaps most importantly – an awareness of what life is like in the rest of the world.

Life in North Korea, however, is hermetically sealed. The only radios permitted in North Korea can only be tuned to North Korean stations. Few North Koreans are permitted to visit Pyongyang, their country’s capital, whereas millions of Chinese travel and study abroad each year. Indeed, when North Korea approached Swedish academics to request training in business management, they insisted that the training take place in conditions as near to those prevailing in North Korea as possible. So the training will take place, not in Stockholm or some other open city, but in communist Hanoi.

From Kim Jong Il down, North Korea’s leadership shows little or no awareness of the "mosquitoes" that opening up the economy and will bring in. Unlike Deng, they will not find them acceptable. Cabbage stalk soup and grass salad, sad to say, are likely to dominate the diet of North Korea’s long-suffering people for a long time yet.