North Korean leader Kim Jong Un waves his hand as he looks at a military parade at Kim Il Sung Square in Pyongyang. Photo / AP
North Korea’s ruling party will meet later this month to tackle the “urgent” task of reviving the country’s agriculture sector as fears rise that chronic food shortages could trigger a humanitarian disaster.
State newspaper, the Rodong Sinmun, reported this week that the gathering would take place in late February as “a turning point is necessary to powerfully promote a fundamental change in agricultural development.”
It did not reveal any further details but the reclusive state has long struggled with malnutrition and the risk of starvation caused by decades of economic mismanagement and the regime’s blinded pursuit of nuclear weapons which takes precedence above the population’s health.
Experts believe the situation has recently worsened in the perfect storm of natural disasters that have wiped out crops and extreme isolation through pandemic border closures.
Last month, the United States-based 38 North programme, which monitors North Korea, warned in a report that “food availability has likely fallen below the bare minimum with regard to human needs,” citing quantity and price data to conclude food insecurity at its worst since the famine of the 1990s.
“The Kim regime has insisted on maintaining a failed economic model and remains committed to its nuclear programme,” it said, adding that the Kim regime was unwilling to face necessary reforms out of fear of “internal competition and its own demise.”
Chronic food insecurity cannot be resolved without radical reforms of the current state-controlled system, said the report. It would require, among other things, “strengthening property rights, opening and revitalising the industrial and service sectors of the economy, and embracing an export-oriented model”.
The war in Ukraine was an additional stressor by driving up global prices of food, energy and fertiliser, it said, concluding, “put simply, North Korea teeters on the brink of famine”.
The famine of the 1990s is still prominent in the country’s collective memory, when the collapse of food delivery systems and Russian support, economic incompetence and floods caused a catastrophe that killed an estimated 600,000 – 1 million people, or about three to five per cent of the population.
Timothy Cho, a North Korean defector who now lives in the United Kingdom, recalls the horrors he experienced as a young boy during that time, when he, like many thousands of children, lived on the streets, trying to forage for scraps of food to stay alive.
“We sometimes went into a cabbage farm and ate raw cabbage. We tried all that we could to survive,” he told the Telegraph. “It was hard to see people next to you die of starvation. It was worse than the Hunger Games.”
He believes the crisis taught the population to be more self-sufficient and less reliant on the government for food supplies, but that despite personal contingency planning, people are now struggling against the odds.
Dr Marcus Noland, executive vice president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, and a North Korea expert, said it was impossible to get a full picture of the current situation because of the lack of access to the country.
The country sealed its borders in early 2020 to protect its weak health system from Covid-19, prompting an exodus of diplomats and aid organisations.
But the available indicators, including volatile food prices, showed that “things are deteriorating and they don’t look good”, he said.
Dr Noland, who visited North Korea in 1997, calculated the food deficit at that time to be about 1.5 million metric tonnes, matching the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation’s (FAO) own estimates.
In a December 2022 report on North Korea’s outlook, the FAO assessed “the food security situation is expected to remain fragile, given persisting economic constraints aggravated by a below-average 2022 agricultural output”.
Dr Noland believes the current food shortage to be about 400,000 metric tonnes.
“Things are bad but they are not famine bad yet,” he said while stressing that the current shortfall still had dire consequences for the population.
“It presumably means real hunger, real impact on the physical and mental development of children. It probably means deaths but I can’t prove that,” he said.
Dr Noland said that while it was possible clandestine food supplies from Russia and China could be alleviating the crisis, the total lack of transparency meant a future famine could also not be ruled out.
“They have pretty effectively sealed off information and so things could be worse and we wouldn’t know,” he said. “It’s a very uncertain situation.”