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The food shortage in North Korea is reportedly growing more severe due to a triple blow from a recent spate of dry weather, a regular season of spring food shortages and higher prices of crops overseas.

In a recent newsletter, the Good Friends, a South Korean aid group, said that only those people in North Korea with relatively good living conditions have managed to live on daily meals, while poorer people have been on the verge of starvation in advance of spring, typically a season in which food shortages are at their most severe.

The aid group cited the story of a military equipment factory in North Korea’s Eundeok country, North Hamgyeong Province, as an example of the North’s worsening food shortages. When the factory manager visits the homes of factory workers because they have been away from work, most of the workers say, “I couldn’t go to work because food ran out at home.”

North Korea’s agricultural production fell by 11 percent last year, after it was hit by floods in August. The country has also been in the grip of a new drought that, with little rainfall registered, is destroying crops. On March 4, the North’s Korean Central News Agency reported that abnormal weather conditions this winter have made it difficult for farmers to grow wheat and barley. “This winter, there were abnormal weather conditions that haven’t been seen in the past,” the North’s official news agency said. In particular, no rainfall was registered in Pyongyang, Pyeongseong and Sariwon in January.

The World Food Program estimates that North Korea’s food shortages will reach 1.4 million tons this year. That volume can feed six million people a year. Soaring prices of agricultural products overseas are also weighing on the North’s food shortages. Kwon Tae-jin, a senior researcher with the South’s Korea Rural Economic Institute, said, “North Korea must spend more on grain imports as international grain prices have surged and shipping rates have risen by two or three times.”

As international grain prices jumped, the Chinese government began introducing quota and tariff systems on its exports of major grains to stabilize grain prices at home. These measures have placed a financial burden on South Korean aid groups, which have traditionally sent corn and soybeans to North Korea after having purchased them in China. “Since last year, it has been difficult to buy soybeans in China even with cash,” said an official at the South Korean aid group Okedongmu. “While our budget for soybean purchases is limited, the pace of the increase in grain prices is too steep,” the official said.


Kwon said, “Aid groups say the extent of this year’s food shortages in North Korea could be similar to that of the mid-1990s, when widespread famine caused many to die. The Lee Myung-bak administration needs to take a flexible attitude toward humanitarian aid for North Korea, including food and fertilizer,” the researcher said.



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