Three destructive typhoons,
U.S.-backed sanctions and the global pandemic are fueling concern that North
Korea's 26 million people could slip back into the devastating food shortages
the country faced during the rule of Kim Jong Un's father in the 1990s.
Kim said the country is under
"an intensive struggle" to recover from the floods and typhoons,
according to the official Korean Central News Agency. Kim has been shown
repeatedly exhorting officials to minimize the damage to crops and boost yields.
A trio of major storms hit
the country in just two weeks in August and September, just before the main
annual harvests, disrupting food supplies in a nation where the United Nations
World Food Program estimates some 40% of the population is already undernourished.
The devastation follows a poor harvest last year and disruption to food imports
from China and elsewhere due to the coronavirus.
"People are reportedly
selling their assets and furniture, taking loans, and going to the mountains to
find medicinal herbs, forage for food and cultivate small patches of land to
survive," the U.N.'s Special Rapporteur on North Korean human rights wrote
in an advance copy of a report to the General Assembly this week.
Border closures due to
COVID-19 that reduced imports of agricultural inputs such as fuel and
fertilizer during planting earlier this year could lead to this year's harvest
being the smallest since 1994, the report said.
While extreme weather events
have disrupted farming around the world, North Korea is especially vulnerable.
A mountainous country, only 22% of its land is suitable for crops, according to
the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. The nation's isolation from global
trade has also left it perennially dependent on food aid, mostly from China.
Floods and droughts in the 1990s led to a famine that killed as much as 10% of
the population.
" North Korea's
dependence on rain-fed agriculture, limited high-quality arable land, low
mechanization of the farming sector; and challenges with importing agricultural
inputs such as fertilizers, combine to make the country vulnerable to climatic
shocks," Kun Li, U.N. World Food Program spokeswoman for Asia and the
Pacific, said in an interview.
Despite improvements in North
Korea's farm output over the past few decades, the country is still in the
bottom quarter of the Global Hunger Index, and in the top quarter of the Index
for Risk Management in terms of disaster risk. Floods and drought regularly
strike North Korea in the same year, contributing to a perennial annual deficit
of about 1 million tons of food, according to FAO estimates.
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