BackKim Jong Un says North Korea faces food crisis due to flooding
The agricultural sector failed to fulfill its grain production plan,’ Kim says
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Kim Jong Un said his country’s food situation is getting tense, an acknowledgment of the continuing challenges inside North Korea following a year of major flood damage, pandemic shutdowns and ongoing sanctions.
Kicking off a plenary session of North Korea’s ruling Workers’ Party, Mr. Kim urged the country’s leaders to resolve food shortages resulting from lower agricultural output that he attributed largely to crop failures caused by last summer’s typhoons, according to a state-media report out of Pyongyang on Wednesday.
“The agricultural sector failed to fulfill its grain production plan," Mr. Kim was quoted as saying.
The North Korean leader’s assessment mirrors independent reporting on the Kim regime’s food stability. The impoverished country last year had an estimated food deficit of about 1 million metric tons, a scarcity that equates to the average North Korean eating 445 calories less a day than the 2,100-calorie-diet recommended by the United Nations, according to a U.S. Department of Agriculture report from January.
This year, North Korea could face food shortages of up to 1.35 million tons, according to a May report from the Korea Development Institute, a think tank backed by the South Korean government. The institute’s report estimated the country’s food requirements are about 5.75 million tons annually.
North Korea’s plenary session was organized to check the progress of the nation’s key policies. Officials will discuss ways to deal with the “current international situation," Mr. Kim said, without mentioning the U.S. directly. Bolstering the regime’s economy and combating Covid-19 remain top priorities, according to the state-media report.
Despite the struggles, few experts expect that North Korea is on the brink of a famine, like the one it suffered in the 1990s. Pyongyang has over the years made pleas for food aid and the country has long battled hunger. Two years ago, amid its worst drought in decades, North Korea blamed international sanctions for causing a food crisis.
The North Korean food situation is bad, though until satellite images of the country’s farmlands emerge, the severity of its woes will be difficult to verify, said Go Myong-hyun, a senior fellow at the Asan Institute, a Seoul-based think tank. Mr. Kim’s words alone aren’t sufficient evidence to presume there is a severe food shortage, he said.
The suspected food shortage comes as North Korea has been facing a broader economic crisis due to the Covid-19 pandemic and ongoing U.S. sanctions. The country experienced a steep downturn last year, economists say, with the economy shrinking as much as 10%. Such a figure would be the worst since the 1990s.
The pandemic, and Pyongyang’s response to it, are chiefly responsible for the country’s current recession, economists say. And though North Korea’s food troubles haven’t yet shown signs of an imminent famine, Mr. Kim told compatriots in April to brace for another “arduous march"—a term that evokes the long period of starvation in the 1990s.
Early last year, North Korea shut down its borders with China, its main economic backer, diminishing any meaningful trade with the outside world. North Korea’s ability to sell its goods abroad had already been under strain due to U.S.-led sanctions that were tightened from 2016 to 2017.
Annual trade between North Korea and China was worth about $2.8 billion just before the pandemic, according to the Seoul-based Korea International Association, which compiled the numbers using Chinese customs data. It plummeted to around $540 million dollars in 2020, association figures show. Under Mr. Kim’s reign, which began in 2011, annual trade between the two countries peaked at more than $6 billion in 2013 and 2014, according to the association.
Trade with China has appeared to slightly rebound since March, the group said, though not to pre-pandemic levels. Much of the increased activity also involves North Korean imports of essential farming items from China that suggest the Kim regime has increased trade to acquire the most necessary raw materials for subsistence, experts on the government in Pyongyang say.
This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text
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