They fear that a new famine will hit North Korea 2:25
(CNN) --
Concern over chronic food shortages in North Korea is growing, and several sources have suggested this week that starvation deaths are likely.
Some experts say the country has reached its worst moment since the famine of the 1990s, known as the "True March", which caused mass famines and killed hundreds of thousands of people, between 3% and 5% of a population that then had 20 million inhabitants.
According to Lucas Rengifo-Keller, an analyst at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, trade data, satellite imagery, and assessments by the United Nations and South Korean authorities suggest that food supplies "have fallen below the amount needed to meet minimum human needs.
Is the world on the brink of global famine? An FAO expert clarifies it
Even if food were distributed equitably -- something almost inconceivable in North Korea, where the elite and the military take precedence -- Rengifo-Keller said "there would be deaths related to hunger."
South Korean authorities agree with that assessment, and Seoul recently announced that it believes starvation deaths are occurring in some areas of the country.
Although the isolation of the country makes it difficult to present solid evidence to support these claims, few experts doubt their assessment.
Even before the covid-19 pandemic, nearly half the North Korean population was undernourished, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).
advertising
Three years of closed borders and isolation cannot but have made things worse.
In a sign of how desperate the situation has become, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un held a four-day meeting of the Workers' Party this week to discuss a revamp of the country's agricultural sector, calling for a "transformation fundamental" of agricultural and state economic plans and the need to strengthen state control of agriculture.
North Korean trucks loaded with sacks of corn await clearance at the Chinese border in 1997, during the period of famine known as the "True March."
Credit: Anu Nousiainen/AFP/Getty Images/FILE
But several experts say Pyongyang can only blame itself for the problems.
During the pandemic, Pyongyang intensified its isolationist tendencies, erecting a second layer of fences along 300 kilometers of its border with China and squeezing out what little cross-border trade it had access to.
And in the last year it has spent valuable resources conducting a record number of missile tests.
"There have been shoot-on-sight (border) orders that were put in place in August 2020... a lockdown on travel and trade, which has included very limited official trade (that was there before)," said Lina Yoon, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch.
The demilitarized zone separating North and South Korea has become a haven for wildlife
During 2022, China officially exported nearly 56 million kilograms of wheat flour or maslin and 53,280 kilograms of cereal grains or flakes to North Korea, according to Chinese customs data.
But Pyongyang's crackdown has strangled unofficial trade, which Yoon points out is "one of the main livelihoods of markets inside North Korea, where ordinary North Koreans buy goods."
Cases of Chinese goods being smuggled into the country, with a border guard being bribed to turn a blind eye, have been almost non-existent since the borders were closed.
Several experts say the underlying problem is years of economic mismanagement and that Kim's efforts to further increase state control will only make things worse.
"North Korea's borders have to open up and they have to resume trade for agriculture to improve and people to feed themselves. But right now they are prioritizing isolation, they are prioritizing repression," Yoon said.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un addresses the Korean Workers' Party in Pyongyang, North Korea, on February 26, 2023. Credit: KCNA/Reuters
But as Rengifo-Keller pointed out, Kim has no interest in allowing the unofficial commerce of the past to resurface in this dynastically ruled country.
"The regime does not want a flourishing business class that could threaten its power."
Then there are the missile tests Kim remains obsessed with and his constant refusals of his neighbor's offers of help.
US believes Russia had a failed ICBM test around the time Biden visited Ukraine
South Korean Foreign Minister Park Jin told CNN in an interview last week that "the only way for North Korea to get out of this problem is to come back to the dialogue table and accept our humanitarian offer to the North." and make a better decision for the future".
On Thursday, Prime Minister Han Duck-soo told CNN that the situation "is getting worse, our intelligence shows, because it is clear that his policies are changing... the president (Kim Jong Un) would like to apply a lot of pressure for it to be dictated by the state, you know, the supply of food to its people, which won't work."
Seoul's Unification Ministry was quick to point out that Pyongyang continues to focus on its nuclear and missile programs rather than feeding its own people.
A visitor views the border between South Korea and North Korea from the Unification Observation Post in Paju, South Korea.
Credit: Ahn Young-joon/AP
At a briefing last month, Vice-Spokesman Lee Hyo-jung said, "According to local and international research institutions, if North Korea had used the spending from the missiles it launched last year on food supplies, it would have been enough to buy more than a million tons of food, which is believed to be more than enough to cover North Korea's annual food shortages."
Seoul's rural development agency believes North Korea's agricultural output last year was 4% lower than the previous year, due to flooding and adverse weather conditions.
Rengifo-Keller fears that the peak of these effects, coupled with the regime's "wrong approach to economic policy", could have a disastrous impact on the already suffering population.
"This is a population that has been chronically undernourished for decades, with high rates of stunting, and all signs point to a deteriorating situation, so it certainly wouldn't take much to push the country into famine."
Famine
