![]() ![]() South Korea’s Foreign Minister Park Jin told CNN in an interview last week that “the only way that North Korea can get out of this trouble is to come back to the dialogue table and accept our humanitarian offer to the North and make a better choice for the future.” ![]() Then there are the missile tests Kim remains obsessed with and his constant refusals of offers of aid from his neighbor. “The regime does not want a flourishing entrepreneurial class that can threaten its power.” KCNA/Reutersīut as Rengifo-Keller pointed out, it is not in Kim’s interest to allow the unofficial trade of the past to re-emerge in this dynastically ruled country. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un addresses the Workers' Party of Korea in Pyongyang, North Korea, on February 26, 2023. ![]() But right now they are prioritizing isolation, they are prioritizing repression,” Yoon said. “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. 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. “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.ĭuring 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.īut 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.”Ĭases 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. 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.Īnd in the past year it has spent precious resources carrying out a record number of missile tests. North Korean trucks loaded with sacks of maize wait for clearance at the Chinese border in 1997, during the famine period known as the "Arduous March." Anu Nousiainen/AFP/Getty Images/FILEīut various experts say Pyongyang has only itself to blame for the problems. 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. Three years of closed borders and isolation can only have made matters worse. Though producing solid evidence to back up those claims is made difficult by the country’s isolation, few experts doubt its assessment.Įven before the Covid pandemic, nearly half of the North Korean population was undernourished, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. ![]() 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. 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.Įven 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.” 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. Concerns about North Korea’s chronic food shortages are growing, with multiple sources suggesting this week that deaths due to starvation are likely. ![]()
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