North Korea’s food woes have worsened amid COVID pandemic

SEOUL, South Korea — There’s little doubt that North Korea’s chronic food shortages worsened due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and speculation about the country’s food insecurity has flared as its top leaders prepare to discuss the “very important and urgent task” of formulating a correct agricultural policy.

Unconfirmed reports say an unspecified number of North Koreans have been dying of hunger. But experts say there is no sign of mass deaths or famine. They say the upcoming ruling Workers’ Party meeting is likely intended to shore up support for North Korean leader Kim Jong Un as he pushes ahead with his nuclear weapons program in defiance of intense U.S.-led pressure and sanctions.

“Kim Jong Un can’t advance his nuclear program stably if he fails to resolve the food problem fundamentally because public support would be shaken,” said Lim Eul-chul, a professor at Kyungnam University’s Institute for Far Eastern Studies in Seoul. “The meeting is being convened to solidify internal unity while pulling together ideas to address the food shortage.”

An enlarged plenary meeting of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party is slated for late February. Its specific agenda is unknown, but the party’s powerful Politburo earlier said that “a turning point is needed to dynamically promote radical change in agricultural development.”

The meeting will be the party’s first plenary session convened just to discuss agricultural issues, though they often are a key topic at broader conferences in North Korea. Raising grain output was one of 12 economic priorities the party adopted during a meeting in December.

It is difficult to know the exact situation in the North, which kept its borders virtually closed during the pandemic. Food shortages and economic hardships have persisted since a famine killed an estimated hundreds of thousands of people in the mid-1990s.

In his first public speech after taking over from his father as leader in late 2011, Kim vowed that North Koreans would “never have to tighten their belts again.”

During the first several years of his rule, the economy achieved modest growth as Kim tolerated some market-oriented activities and increased exports of coal and other minerals to China, the North’s main ally and biggest trading partner. More recently, however, tougher international sanctions over Kim’s nuclear program, draconian pandemic-related restrictions and outright mismanagement have taken a severe economic toll.

South Korean estimates put North Korea’s grain production last year at about 4.5 million tons, a 3.8 percent decrease from a year earlier.