The Pyongyang regime has devoted an exceptional plenary session to agriculture since Sunday, which would indicate that the country is going through a new period of scarcity. The South Korean press evokes the death of people who died of hunger.
by Philippe Mesmer (Tokyo, Correspondence)
Regularly bordering on the shortage, North Korea would live a food situation degraded by climatic vagaries and three years of almost total isolation decided after the appearance of the COVID-19 in its Chinese neighbor. Based on this observation, the leader Kim Jong-un called, Monday, February 27, to a “radical change” and to a “stable and sustainable development” of agriculture.
The North Korean leader intervened during the seventh plenary meeting of 8 e central committee of the ruling labor party, started on Sunday and devoted specially to the food emergency. “Normally, such plenary meetings are organized every six months. The last dates back to the end of December,” notes Cheong Seong-Chang, of the South Korean Institute Sejong.
Exceptional, this session could thus reflect a disturbing situation in a country struck, at the heart of the 1990s, by a famine responsible for several hundred thousand victims. The South Korean daily Korea Herald reported, on February 6, hunger people in Kaesong, a city close to the demilitarized area and normally privileged by the regime. On the 15th, the Dong-A Ilbo in turn evoked reductions in the daily rations of the soldiers.
This information has not been confirmed, even if the South Korean government has also spoken of people who died of malnutrition in “certain regions”, without giving details. The Minister of Unification, Kwon Young-Se, however explained on February 15 that “the situation does not seem as serious as at the time of the famine of the 1990s”.
distribution problem
The question divides experts. North Korea “vacillates on the brink of potentially massive famine”, estimates Lucas Rengifo-Keller, of the Peterson Institute of International Economy, in an analysis published on the specialized site 38 North. “Food availability has probably fallen under the bare minimum to meet the needs” and would be “the weakest since the famine of the 1990s”. Kwon Tae-Jin, Advisor to the South Korean government, shares this observation: “The agricultural production last year has not been good and government stocks are exhausted,” he said to the NK site News.
According to Seoul, crops would not have exceeded 4.51 million tonnes in 2022, against 4.69 million tonnes in 2021, a drop of approximately 3.8 %, partly due to the Drought of spring. However, North Korea needs around 5.5 million tonnes of cereals to feed its 25 million inhabitants. The missing million tonnes is partly covered by unofficial purchases in China. Despite the limits of production, the South Korean government attributes the current situation more to a distribution problem than a real shortage. It would result from increased control over private cereal sales on the markets, decided during the pandemic.
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