Seoul, South KoreaCNN —
Concerns about North Korea’s chronic food shortages are growing, with multiple sources suggesting this week that deaths due to starvation are likely.
Some experts say the country has hit its worst point since a 1990s famine known as the “Arduous March” caused mass starvation and killed hundreds of thousands of people, or an estimated 3-5% of what was then a 20 million-strong population.
Trade data, satellite images and assessments by the United Nations and South Korean authorities all suggest the food supply has now “dipped below the amount needed to satisfy minimum human needs,” according to Lucas Rengifo-Keller, a research analyst at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
Even if food was distributed equally – something close to inconceivable in North Korea where the elite and military take priority – Rengifo-Keller said “you would have hunger-related deaths.”
South Korean officials agree with that assessment, with Seoul announcing recently that it believes deaths from starvation are occurring in some areas of the country. Though producing solid evidence to back up those claims is made difficult by the country’s isolation, few experts doubt its assessment.
Even before the Covid pandemic, nearly half of the North Korean population was undernourished, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.
Three years of closed borders and isolation can only have made matters worse.
In a sign of just how desperate the situation has become, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un held a four-day Workers’ Party meeting this week to discuss a revamp of the country’s agricultural sector, calling for a “fundamental transformation” in farming and state economic plans and a need to strengthen state control of farming.
But various experts say Pyongyang has only itself to blame for the problems. During the pandemic, Pyongyang ramped up its isolationist tendencies, erecting a second layer of fencing along 300 kilometers of its border with China and squeezing what little cross border trade it had access to.
And in the past year it has spent precious resources carrying out a record number of missile tests.
“There’s been shoot on sight orders (at the border) that were put in place in August 2020 … a blockade on travel and trade, which has included what very limited official trade (there was before),” said Lina Yoon, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch.
During 2022, China officially exported nearly 56 million kilograms of wheat or maslin flour and 53,280 kg of cereals in grain/flakes form to North Korea, according to Chinese customs data.
But Pyongyang’s clampdown has strangled off unofficial trade, which as Yoon points out is “one of the main lifelines of the markets inside North Korea where ordinary North Koreans buy products.”
Cases in which people smuggle Chinese products into the country, with a bribe to a border guard to look the other way, have been next to non-existent since the borders closed.
Various experts say the root problem is years of economic mismanagement and that Kim’s efforts to ramp up state control further will only make things worse.
“The North Korean borders need to open and they need to restart trade and they need to bring these things in for agriculture to improve and they need food to feed the people. But right now they are prioritizing isolation, they are prioritizing repression,” Yoon said.
