Hundreds of thousands of North Korean troops mobilize to help plant and harvest crops. The country’s military is redeploying some of its munitions factories to produce tractors and threshing machines, while also converting some airfields into greenhouses. being soldiers Reportedly asked to extend their service for three years and spend them on farms.
The guidelines come directly from North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un, who has called on his military to become “a driving force” in increasing food production.
It is both an economic necessity and a geopolitical calculation for an isolated nation facing food shortages. Sanctions imposed since 2016 over the North’s nuclear program have devastated exports and its ability to earn hard currency. Then the pandemic and resulting border closures squeezed what little trade was left with China.
There is no possible relief unless China concludes that its communist neighbor cannot handle its food problem alone and decides to send large aid shipments. North Korea now appears to be looking forward to a protracted confrontation with the United States as the Biden administration, focused on the war in Ukraine, shows no urgency to negotiate.
“The situation is the worst since Kim came to power,” said Kwon Tae-jin, an expert on North Korea’s food situation at the Seoul-based GS&J Institute. “If I were him, I wouldn’t know where to start to solve the problem.”
The shortages in the North loom large in the political backdrop. When mr. Kim convened his Workers’ Party last month, the main agenda being the food issue. When he presided over his Central Military Commission last weekend, state media only briefly mentioned the threat posed by joint military exercises between South Korea and the United States, focusing instead on Kim’s food campaign.
South Korea is trying to use the issue as leverage to get Mr. Kim to talk again.
When mr. Kim’s Regime launched an intercontinental ballistic missile Last month, South Korea blamed the North for hosting it major military parades And developing nuclear missiles as the people “starved to death one by one in the midst of a severe food crisis”. Seoul tends to highlight the food shortages in the north as a criticism of Pyongyang for spending resources on its nuclear program.
South Korean officials later said they did not expect the shortages to lead to mass starvation or that Mr. Kim’s grip on power. During background briefings over the past few days, they said they don’t have enough data to estimate how many North Koreans are starving. But they insisted they had reports of people dying of starvation in smaller cities, but not in Pyongyang, home of the well-fed elites.
Stricken by drought and floods, crippled by socialist mismanagement and hurt by international sanctions, North Koreans have long struggled with food shortages. Millions died during a famine in the 1990s. Even in the best years, many North Koreans go hungry.
But the pandemic made it worse. For three years, North Korea was forced to close its border with China, its only major trading partner. Only an absolute minimum of trade was allowed. The closures also made it more difficult for smugglers to deliver goods to the North unofficial marketswhere ordinary people get extra food when the moribund ration system can no longer provide.
Hardly a day goes by without the state media in the North urging people to help produce more grains.
It is impossible to get a complete picture of the food situation in the isolated country. Some analysts say Mr. Kim is less concerned about a possible famine than about the protracted confrontation with Washington over its nuclear program. With no sanctions relief in sight, Mr. Kim knows that the deficits are a major vulnerability.
“Food is key to how long he can last,” said Choi Eunju, an analyst at South Korea’s Sejong Institute. “Kim Jong-un must strengthen his country’s survivability as it faces the expanded challenges of sanctions and the pandemic.”
Mr. Kim is campaigning for more food while vowing to take “sustained and forceful” countermeasures, which means more weapons testing. North Korea launched an intercontinental ballistic missile on Thursday and a short-range ballistic missile on Sunday, the second and third such tests in just over a month.
“North Korea is the kind of country that must show military strength through provocations when faced with domestic problems such as a food crisis,” said Yi Jisun, an analyst with the Institute for National Security Strategy, a research institute affiliated with the National Intelligence Service of the South. Employ. “It increases military tension to consolidate domestic unity.”
Under Mr. Kim“North Korea has rapidly expanded and implemented its nuclear program a record number of missile tests last year. But he has yet to deliver on the promise he made more than a decade ago when he took power: that his people “no longer have to tighten their belts”.
In reality, he brought more punitive measures to his people by accelerating his nuclear program. His diplomacy with President Donald J. Trump failed lifting sanctions. When the pandemic hit, the bad weatherdevastating crops.
In June 2021, Mr. Kim for one “tense” food situation at a meeting of the Labor Party. At the meeting, he issued a “special order” to his army to release some of its rice supplies set aside for war to help alleviate food shortages, a rare move in the country, where the military has always been given priority in resources, according to South Korean officials.
It wasn’t enough.
“North Korea was unable to provide its farmers with sufficient agricultural tools or fertilizers because of the pandemic and border closure,” said Kim Dawool, an analyst at South Korea’s Institute for International Economic Policy.
According to the South Korea International Trade Association, fertilizer imports from northern China fell to $5.4 million last year from $85 million in 2018. In 2021, Mr. Kim ordered his farmers to plant twice as much wheat, for which does not require as much fertilizer as corn.
North Korea’s grain production plummeted to 3.4 million tons in 2020, from 4.6 million tons last year. Although production has recovered over the past two years, the country still fell a million tons short of what it needed, according to estimates by the South’s Rural Development Administration.
mr. Kim’s own policies have not helped.
The money North Korea spent on its missile tests last year was more than enough to import a million tons of grain, South Korean officials said. In addition to the shortages, North Korea foreign aid rejected and deterred food smugglers by installing more fences and a shoot to kill order along the border with China. It also tightened controls on people’s movement between cities, making it more difficult for merchants to ship goods.
Mr. Kim also reasserted socialist control by ordering state stores to buy grains from collective farms and sell them at below-market prices, while crack down on the grain trade in the unofficial markets, according to Asia Press International, a website in Japan that tracks the North Korean economy through clandestine correspondents there. But the shops could not meet the food needs.
Hardest hit were the poor. In lean years, they consume more corn, while the elite prefer rice. In a sign of increasing distress for the more vulnerable, the price of corn has risen more than that of rice, according to indexes compiled by Asia Press International.
But in the state media, Mr. Kim was not reproached.
This month, the party newspaper Rodong Sinmun interviewed the chief of an agricultural research center called Jang Hyon-chol.
“I can’t lift my head because of guilt,” said Mr. Jang, as he couldn’t match Mr. Kim’s commitment to improving the food supply.