North Korea is at risk of a massive wave of famine

Concerns about chronic food shortages at North Korea are increasing, with many sources saying that this week that starvation deaths are likely.

Some experts say the country has reached worst point since the famine of the 1990s, known as the “Hard March” that caused mass starvation and killed hundreds of thousands of people.

Trade data, satellite imagery and assessments from the United Nations and South Korean authorities suggest that the food supply has now “sink below the amount required to satisfy minimum human needs”according to Lucas Rengifo-Kellerresearch analyst at the Peterson Institute in International Economics.

Even if the food was distributed equally – almost unimaginable in North Korea where the elite and the military take precedence – there would again be a large number of deaths related to starvation.

South Korean officials agree with this assessment, with Seoul recently announcing that it believes starvation deaths are occurring in some areas of the country, not all. Although producing solid evidence to support these claims is made difficult by the country’s isolation, few experts doubt her assessment.

Even before the Covid pandemic, almost half of North Korea’s population was malnourishedaccording to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.

In fact, with three years of closed borders and isolation, things have only gotten 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 an overhaul of the country’s agricultural sector, calling for a “fundamental transformation” in agriculture and the state, economic plans and the need to strengthen state control of agriculture.

But several experts say Pyongyang has only itself to blame for the problems. During the pandemic, Pyongyang reinforced isolationist tendencies by 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 over the past year it has spent precious resources conducting a record number of missile tests.

During 2022, China officially exported approx 56 million kilos of wheat flour or olive and 53,280 kg of cereals in grain/flake form to North Korea, according to Chinese customs data.

Several experts say the underlying problem is chronic economic mismanagement, and that Kim’s efforts to further tighten state control will only make matters worse.

But as Rengifo-Keller pointed out, it is not in Kim’s interest to allow the informal trade of the past to re-emerge in this dynastically ruled country. “The regime does not want a thriving business class that can threaten its power”.

Seoul’s agricultural development agency estimates that North Korea’s crop production this year is 4 percent lower than last year, as it suffered from flooding and adverse weather, among other things.

Rengifo-Keller fears that the culmination of these effects combined with the regime’s “flawed approach to economic policy” could have a devastating impact on an already suffering population.

“This has been a chronically malnourished population for decades, with all signs pointing to an undoubtedly rapidly worsening situation, so it certainly doesn’t take much longer to drive the country into famine.”