hankyoreh

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un sits inside a prototype of a passenger bus in Pyongyang on March 25, 2021. Kim did not oversee the launch of a new type of missile that the North conducted the same day. (Yonhap News)

Around the time of its recent 8th Workers’ Party of Korea Congress, North Korea admitted multiple times that its five-year strategy for national economic development has been going poorly.

It has also stressed repeatedly that it intends to use that as a basis for careful planning and pursuit of the new economic strategy that goes into effect this year. This includes a much deeper reflection upon its failures in the area of agriculture — a blistering critique that has dismissed the performance figures and plans as “hot air.”

North Korea’s reflection can also be construed in a different way. That is, it could be an act of political engineering, with certain interested parties taking the first step to defuse things before all the different lurking economic and agricultural issues blow up all at once.

But that isn’t so important. The key takeaway is that Pyongyang has openly admitted its agricultural failures. Indeed, the serious problems with North Korea’s agriculture are apparent even from an outsider’s perspective.

North Korea has yet to resolve the food shortage issues that erupted with its economic crisis in the 1990s. The reasons for that are common knowledge.

Domestic production remains far short of its potential owing to a lack of inputs, devastated forests and an inadequate agricultural base. There isn’t enough foreign currency to purchase sufficient food to make up for the shortfall. And because of the collective management of cooperative farms, the North hasn’t succeeded in encouraging a willingness to work on the farmers’ part.

Based on all of this, we can see that all of North Korea’s food shortage problems stem from economic issues.

But let’s hold off for a moment on puzzling over these fundamental issues and ways of resolving them. They all have to do not only with changes in the North Korean regime but also with external economic interchange in a wide range of areas — and if we delve deeper into them, we see that they are intermediate- to long-term matters to be resolved as we go about establishing a peace regime at some later date.

The issue we should be focusing on right now is that of North Korea’s food supplies and production for 2021.

Last year’s food production and the input over the past few months – which will serve as the basis for North Korea’s food supply this year – have decreased. There’s likely to be a worse shortage of food than ever before, which is being signaled by the rising prices of cereals at North Korean marketplaces. The price of rice has held steady, but the price of corn at the end of last year was unusually high compared to the same point last year.

That suggests that the food shortage will grow worse during the rest of the year. It’s assumed that ordinary North Koreans will somehow muddle through, as they always have. But how will vulnerable members of society, including infants, pregnant and nursing mothers, the infirm, and the elderly, handle the tough times ahead?

The conditions for food production in North Korea this year are even gloomier. Since 2016, the North has been under increasingly stringent sanctions that have taken a toll. In addition, all the inputs that are needed for agricultural production have been substantially disrupted by North Korea’s lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic.

An especially worrying disruption is falling imports of chemical fertilizer. North Korea imported 260,000 tons of chemical fertilizer from China in 2018, but that plunged to just 19,000 tons in 2020. The situation at the beginning of this year is much the same.

Recalling that North Korea depends on imports for more than half of its total fertilizer usage and that it has to apply more than half of its yearly fertilizer in the spring, it’s clear that the current decrease in the supply of fertilizer poses a great threat to North Korea’s agriculture this year.

Some argue that the decrease in fertilizer usage is natural because of North Korea’s long-standing emphasis on organic farming. But organic fertilizer, which has a lower nutrient content, is no substitute for chemical fertilizer.

Being derived from granite, Korean soil is poor in nutrients, which means there’s no hope of boosting productivity without the assistance of chemical fertilizer.

There are already indications that North Korea’s food supply this year will be inadequate. At the current moment, it’s also easy to predict insufficient food production this year, leading to insufficient food supply next year as well.

Isn’t it time for the South Korean and North Korean authorities to address the humanitarian situation that the North Korean is currently facing or will face in the future? How long are we going to keep idly waiting and getting angry without taking action?

By Kim Young-hoon, senior researcher at Korea Rural Economic Institute

Please direct comments or questions to [english@hani.co.kr]