North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has admitted that North Korea’s food situation is “tense,” state media reported yesterday, sounding the alarm in a country that had a devastating famine in the 1990s in which hundreds of thousands died.
The country, which is under multiple sets of international sanctions over its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs, has long struggled to feed itself, suffering chronic food shortages.
Last year, the COVID-19 pandemic, and a series of summer storms and floods added yet more pressure on the flagging economy.
Photo: EPA-EFE / KCNA
At a plenary meeting of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea, Kim said that the economy improved this year, with industrial output growing 25 percent from a year earlier, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported.
However, there had been a “series of deviations” due to a number of challenges, Kim added.
“The people’s food situation is now getting tense as the agricultural sector failed to fulfill its grain production plan due to the damage by typhoon last year,” Kim said.
A series of typhoons last summer triggered floods that destroyed thousands of homes and inundated farmland.
Kim called for steps to minimize the effect of such natural disasters, saying that ensuring a good harvest was a “top priority.”
The meeting also discussed the “prolonged nature” of the pandemic, KCNA reported.
Pyongyang has poor medical infrastructure and a chronic shortage of medicines, and analysts say a COVID-19 outbreak would wreak havoc on the isolated country.
The North imposed a strict lockdown when it sealed its border in January last year to stop the virus spreading from neighboring China, where it first emerged before sweeping the world.
It has long insisted that it has had no cases of the virus — a claim that analysts doubt — but the North has paid a huge economic price for the blockade.
Trade with China, the North’s economic lifeline, has slowed to a trickle, while all international aid work faces tight restrictions.
The effect of the pandemic has “most likely exacerbated” the humanitarian situation in the North, with about 10.6 million people in need, a spokesperson for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said.
In another admission of the North’s hardship, Kim in April told citizens to buckle down for the “worst-ever situation.”
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