North Koreans are at growing risk of starvation

Hunger makes people desperate. On February 10th a starving man in his 70s took a stand outside the communist party office in Hyesan, a city in the northern part of North Korea. As party members arrived for work, he called out, “I’ll die of starvation if things continue like this, please give me food.” Other famished people quickly joined him. When security guards tried to dispel the crowd, a skirmish ensued. In a country where causing a disturbance can get you sent to the gulag, or worse, dissent of this kind appears to be vanishingly rare.

Such incidents, reported by Rimjin-gang, a secret group of journalists operating inside North Korea, offer a glimpse of the closed-off state’s growing food crisis. The UN reckons that between 2019 and 2021, 42% of North Koreans were malnourished. And as a result of poor weather conditions and a shortage of fertiliser—in part due to the country’s self-imposed three-year quarantine—it had an especially poor harvest last year. Total food production was only 4.5m tonnes, down by 3.8% compared with the year before, according to South Korea’s rural development agency. That is more than 1.2m tonnes less than the UN’s World Food Programme estimated in 2019 was needed to feed the country.