An Agent-Based Model for Simulating Land Degradation and Food Shortage in North Korea

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.