N. Korea holds rare meeting on farming amid food shortage
Recent unconfirmed reports have said an unknown number of North Koreans have died of hunger. But observers have seen no indication of mass deaths or famine in North Korea, though its food shortage has likely deepened due to pandemic-related curbs, persistent international sanctions and its own mismanagement.
During a high-level meeting of the ruling Workers’ Party that began Sunday, senior party officials reviewed last year’s work under state goals to accomplish “rural revolution in the new era,” the official Korean Central News Agency reported.
The report said that the meeting of the party’s Central Committee will determine “immediate, important” tasks on agricultural issues and “urgent tasks arising at the present stage of the national economic development.”
KNCA didn’t say whether Kim spoke during the meeting or how long it would last. Senior officials such as Cabinet Premier Kim Tok Hun and Jo Yong Won, one of Kim’s closest aides who handles the Central Committee’s organizational affairs, were also attending.
The meeting is the party’s first plenary session convened only to discuss agriculture. Monday’s report didn’t elaborate on its agenda, but the party’s powerful Politburo said earlier this month that a “a turning point is needed to dynamically promote radical change in agricultural development.”
Most analysts believe North Korea’s food situation today is nowhere near the extremes of the 1990s, when hundreds of thousands of people died in a famine. However, some experts say its food insecurity is likely at its worst since Kim took power in 2011, after Covid-19 restrictions further shocked an economy battered by decades of mismanagement and crippling US-led sanctions imposed over Kim’s nuclear program.
Choked off
In early 2020, North Korea tried to shield its population from the coronavirus by imposing stringent border controls that choked off trade with China, its main ally and economic lifeline. Russia’s war on Ukraine possibly worsened the situation by driving up global prices of food, energy and fertilizer, on which North Korea’s agricultural production is heavily dependent.
After spending more than two years in a strict pandemic lockdown, North Korea last year reopened freight train traffic with China and Russia. More than 90 percent of North Korea’s official external trade goes through its border with China. / AP