Food shortages in North Korea appear to be spreading, with sources inside the country telling Radio Free Asia that up to 30% of farmers in two northern provinces cannot work on collective farms because they are weak from starvation.
Although the army was sent in to pick up the slack, the food crisis has worsened in Ryanggang and Chagang provinces, which border China. a resident associated with rural economic planning in Ryanggang told Radio Free Asia’s Korean Service on condition of anonymity for security reasons.
North Korea suffers from chronic food shortages every year. But a drought last year that ruined potato and corn crops, combined with a lack of imports from China due to a prolonged border closure during the COVID-19 pandemic, made matters worse, the economic planner said.
The steps the government took to deal with the pandemic may also be contributing to the shortage.
Most farms in North Korea are collective enterprises, where workers from one region cooperate to plant and harvest food, which is then shared among communities.
But last year, the government distributed a plot of land to each family to farm so they wouldn’t come into contact with each other and potentially spread the virus. This made the attendance of the workers irrelevant from the point of view of the authorities, since each family worked its own plot.
“The current food crisis at Ryanggang and Chagang Cooperative Farms is so severe that it cannot be compared to 2022, the time of the coronavirus pandemic,” the economic planner said.
keep people in line
Authorities are sanctioning administrative officials who cannot maintain the minimum 60% worker attendance rate, the planner said.
The Central Committee’s Organization and Guidance Department ordered that if any collective farm workers die of starvation, lower-level party and administrative officials will be “severely punished,” another Ryanggang resident said.
A UN expert agrees that the crisis so far this year seems worse than the one last year.
Currently, about 42% of the North Korean population is malnourished due to food shortages, Elizabeth Salmon, the UN special rapporteur for human rights in North Korea, said in a report to the UN Human Rights Council. .
North Korea will be short of about 800,000 tons of rice this year, a representative of South Korea’s National Intelligence Service, or NIS, said in a closed trade report to the National Assembly Intelligence Committee in March.
Potatoes cost 2,000 won, or about 20 US cents, per kilogram (2.2 pounds) at the market in Hyesan, Ryanggang province, the economic planner said. That’s the highest price since 2015, he said.
“It is evidence that the food shortage for residents in the northern highlands is severe,” he said.
running away from difficulties
Living conditions are so bad that two desperate families fled the country this month on a fishing boat, crossing into South Korean waters in the Yellow Sea, according to interviews by the military and the NIS.
Fleeing North Korea on the high seas is relatively rare, as most fugitives leave the country by crossing the border into China. The last such escape occurred in 2017, when five North Koreans fled south into waters east of the peninsula.
The South Korean military first saw the fishing boat as it approached the disputed maritime border of the Northern Limit Line. When the launch crossed the line, the military boarded and confirmed the intentions of the fugitives to flee to the South.
They were then transferred to an investigation center for questioning and background checks. Once cleared, they will be admitted to a North Korean refugee settlement support center for about three months before joining South Korean society.
Two South Korean government agencies confirmed the incident to RFA.
“It is a fact that the North Koreans recently defected to South Korea, and a joint investigation (with the military) it is underway,” a NIS representative told RFA. The two families were made up of fewer than 10 people and included children.(Dir. Park, is that correct?)
The two families are headed by millennial siblings according to The Korea Herald, one of South Korea’s leading English-language newspapers.
Citing sources familiar with the two brothers and their families, the report says that they decided to flee to South Korea with their wives, children and their mother because they were looking for a better life, as shown on South Korean television programs that they watched in secret. years.
In particular, it was the talk show “Now on My Way to Meet You,” which features North Korean fugitives adjusting to their new lives in the South, that prompted them to try to escape, they said in a screening interview with government officials. .
In North Korea, they faced discrimination because their late father, who died several years ago, had been turned away from joining the Korean Workers’ Party, which is the gateway to preferential jobs, education, social status, and better rations. of food, according to the report. .
The number of North Koreans fleeing to South Korea was around 1,000 a year until 2019, but then dropped sharply during the pandemic to 229 in 2020, 63 in 2021 and 67 in 2022, according to Unification Ministry statistics.
potato shortage
Meanwhile, in the north, potato production was so low last year due to drought that there may only be enough potatoes to plant this season, not enough to use for food, the first source said.
Taehongdan county, known for its potato production, harvested only 8 to 15 tons per year. jeongbo (2.45 acres) due to extreme drought last year, he said.
“They need 8 tons of potatoes per jeongbo to plant in spring. So, at worst, they only grew enough to save seed.”
In an effort to avoid punishment, cooperative farm managers beg for food from the wealthy in their areas, the second resident said.
“They borrowed the food, promising to pay it back twice as much in the fall, and distributed it to farm workers to support their lives.”
Translated by Claire Shinyoung Oh Lee. Edited by Eugene Whong.