North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has launched a rare political meeting to improve the agricultural sector, state media reported Monday, as observers suggest the country is on the brink of famine.
At the largest plenary meeting, which began on Sunday, the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party reviewed last year’s work to realize the “rural revolution in the new era,” the North Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported. , in its acronym in English). English).
KCNA said North Korea’s one-party Central Committee meeting will identify “immediate and important” tasks on agricultural issues and “urgent tasks arising from the current state of national economic development.”
Besides being rare for North Korea to convene a plenary meeting on a single topic, this was the first meeting devoted to agriculture.
South Korean experts estimate that North Korea has about 1 million tons less grain than it needs to feed the population, which is 20% of annual food needs.
The South Korean Rural Development Administration estimated in December that the North produced 4.5 million tons of grain last year, 3.8 percent less than in 2021.
Pyongyang needs about 5.5 million tons of grain each year to feed a population of 25 million who suffer from chronic malnutrition.
In recent years, half of the gap has typically been filled by unofficial purchases of rice from China, according to Kwon Tae-jin, a senior economist at the GS&J Institute in South Korea.
The outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic has forced Pyongyang to protect the health system with strict border controls that have strangled trade with China, the country’s main economic ally.
Kwon Tae-jin said the restrictions affected China’s unofficial rice purchases and North Korean authorities’ efforts to tighten controls and restrict private resale of grains also worsened the situation.
North Korea was further affected by devastating typhoons and floods in 2020, which decimated crops.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has exacerbated the situation by raising world prices for food, energy and fertilizers, on which North Korea’s agricultural production largely depends.
The Ministry of Unification of South Korea, in charge of relations with the North, assured last week, without revealing specific data, that the food situation in the neighboring country was worsening and mentioned deaths from hunger in some regions.
“We believe that the food shortage is serious,” said ministry spokesman Koo Byoung-sam, adding that Pyongyang had asked the World Food Program for assistance.
In a study published last month on the North Korea-focused website 38 North, analyst Lucas Rengifo-Keller said food insecurity in the country was at its worst since a famine that killed hundreds of thousands of people. in the 1990s.
Source: TSF
