Reports that people are “starving” N Korea is struggling to feed itself Coronavirus pandemic News

Seoul, South Korea – United Nations Security Council sanctions, the closure of China’s COVID-19 border and the drought in 2020 are combined with typhoon rains to create a severe food shortage in North Korea, raising concerns about widespread malnutrition and potential recurrence in the country. The famine of the 1990s.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un acknowledged the problem at a meeting of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party in June.

“People’s food situation is growing tense“Kim said, according to North Korean state media, adding that the agricultural sector did not comply with its grain production plan due to the damage caused by last year’s typhoons.

Kim also mentioned the impact of COVID-19.

“It is essential that all parties and states concentrate on agriculture,” the North Korean leader said.

Hazel Smith, a North Korean expert at SOAS University in London who spent the best part of the country from 1998 to 2001 developing an analysis of agricultural data for UNICEF and the World Food Program, took a clear picture of what was happening.

“Children under the age of seven, pregnant women and nurses, the vulnerable, the elderly … are people who are hungry right now,” said Smith, who has taken previous studies across the country.

North Korea needs 5.2 million tons of food by 2020, but only produces four million tons, and has left a deficit of more than one million tons, the Seoul Korean Development Institute said in a report last month.

Despite imports, North Korea will face a 780,000-tonne food gap by 2020-2021, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization calculated in a country report in June, explaining the impact of the drought in early 2020, followed by a typhoon. and heavy rains in August and September made it very difficult to produce food.

“If this gap is not adequately covered through trade and / or food aid, households may experience a severe period between August and October 2021,” the FAO said.

The United Nations Children’s Agency has recently warned about the country’s serious dangers.

In North Korea, “10 million people are considered food insecure … 140,000 children under the age of 5 suffer from acute malnutrition … and higher malnutrition and mortality rates are projected for 2021,” the UN Humanitarian Report on Humanitarian Status said in February.

Although almost all foreign diplomats and aid agencies have left North Korea, unconfirmed reports say the situation is deteriorating.

“There are so many other beggars, some people who died of starvation in the border area,” Lina Yoon, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch, said about a witness of a missionary working inside North Korea.

Disabled penalties

Analysts agreed that the COVID-19 pandemic, which prompted the government to close the Chinese border, has played an important role in the current chronic food shortage, with some arguing that the problem originated in 2017.

The United Nations Security Council imposed penalties of 2375 and 2397 in September and December 2017 to restrict imports of crude oil and refined petroleum products from North Korea.

Without fuel, farmers have been prevented from planting and harvesting crops and bringing their products to market.

“Agriculture is based on oil anywhere in the world … It’s not rocket science,” SOAS Smith told Al Jazeera, which sees North Korea as the primary cause of a potential humanitarian disaster.

“The most notable factor nearby [for the food shortage] natural gas was banned by UN sanctions in 2017 and oil was severely restricted – going to North Korea, ”he said.

North Korea has been heavily penalized since 2006 for its nuclear and missile programs.

But after U.S. President Donald Trump became president of the United States in 2017, he launched a campaign of maximum pressure, targeting Security Council sanctions and imposing unilateral U.S. sanctions to force North Korean leadership to abandon missile and nuclear programs.

The movements did nothing to slow down Pyongyang’s nuclear progress; so Trump changed his turn and held numerous unprecedented summits with Kim, and the North Korean leader called for easing of sanctions. The US’s refusal to agree led to the collapse of denuclearization talks.

“The sanctions are not being implemented perfectly, but they appear to be fulfilling the basic purpose of pressuring the North Korean authorities by giving a severe blow to its economy,” said the South Korean government-sponsored Institute of the National Union of Korea. Korean Yonhap News.

Smith disagreed.

It is the people of North Korea who are suffering the effects of the sanctions.

“They (the penalties) don’t affect the government or the elite … the companies that take away the penalties. They don’t go hungry,” Smith said.

North Korea has relied on food supplies in the past, such as rice, from neighbors, but many products are being maintained in ports because the border with China is closed. [File: Lee Jin-man/AP Photo]

The damage caused by the sanctions has also exacerbated the closure of China’s border, with Beijing responsible for 90 percent of North Korea’s foreign trade.

After Pyongyang sealed its efforts to exclude COVID-19, imports from China fell by 81 percent in 2020, according to the East Asia Forum, a Seoul reflection group.

Goods entering China from North Korea are increasingly fertilizer and oil, awaiting medical supplies, household goods and food, Chad O’Carroll, KoreaRisk’s chief adviser and NK News publisher, told Al Jazeera.

“I have heard that there are literally thousands of containers stuck in Chinese ports that were never going to go to North Korea. Some of those goods have reached “sale” dates, ”O’Carroll said.

The lack of such imports is believed to have wreaked havoc on North Korean markets, with the price of a kilo of rice in Pyongyang rising by 22% in a single week in June, according to a media outlet based in Seoul-based Daily NK. . Trade controls have also helped raise the price of some imported goods – a bottle of shampoo has grown 10 times and now costs $ 200.

The wild scales that indicate serious problems in the supply chain have no precedent for Kim Jong Un, who took power in 2011.

“This is the first time we have seen such price volatility since becoming a leader, and there is no end to the COVID cuts that are causing the change,” said O’Carroll, as his NK News works with sources across the North Korean and Chinese border.

Price fluctuations have pushed North Koreans to change their eating habits – replacing rice with corn is cheaper, and the cost of other daily necessities is also rising. The North Koreans are increasingly unhappy, Kwon Tae-jin, the director of the North. Korea, at the Global Strategy Networking Journal Institute at the Northeast Asia Research Center, told Al Jazeera.

“If this continues, there could be doubts about Kim Jong Un’s leadership and he will feel political pressure, he seems to have been judged as a threat,” Kwon said.

It may be this pressure that prompted Kim to admit that there was a problem.

The recognition was an “effort to inform residents and give them a sense of security,” Choi Su-min, a researcher at the Sejong Institute in Seoul, told Al Jazeera.

Amid COVID-19 restrictions and blockades, a few relief groups that were still working in North Korea have almost completely withdrawn. In December 2020, they left the last international partners who are members of UNICEF and the Red Cross.

The UN has also warned the North Korean government of the impact of COVID-19 restrictions – especially on medicines – on vaccines. North Korea is now at risk of running out of polio and tuberculosis outbreaks “with a series of vaccines glued to the Chinese border,” UNICEF said in February.

O’Carroll of NK News agreed. “Without upgrading medical supplies and drugs, there is likely to be a slow-burning humanitarian disaster,” he said.

North Korea closed its borders in an attempt to exclude COVID-19, but essential supplies have led to it being stuck on the border. [File: Jon Chol Jin/AP Photo]

In the 1990s, the North Korean famine caused half a million and three million deaths, a humanitarian catastrophe caused by successive droughts and floods, a loss of Soviet aid, and poor economic management.

SOAS Smith conducted the most detailed study of this famine and the deaths numbered about half a million. He said that today, despite North Korea being one of the most isolated countries in the world, outsiders are unaware of the situation.

“I’m not an alarmist,” Smith said of the current situation, adding that “we’re not in the state of ignorance we had in the 90s. Today we know exactly what’s going to happen in North Korea, even if we can’t get in and count the grass blades.”

He argued that the real question is what to do about UNSC sanctions and North Korea’s unwillingness to negotiate its nuclear deterrent.

There is now a kind of symbiotic relationship between UN member states that do not want to accept sanctions, that are causing the crisis and that North Korea’s autonomy policy or “Juche”, leader Kim Jong Un, his people or opponents – the North demands outside help.

“It’s a holy covenant,” Smith said.

Considering the security interests that prevent immediate easing of sanctions, Smith recommended reviewing the sanctions, and suspending the sanctions from 2017, aimed at oil, “because we know they are having a very detrimental effect on the entire population, and the most vulnerable.”

With additional reports by Jenny Yu.