A growing number of North Korean families are going hungry because of food shortages in the country, Daily NK has learned.
“The number of hungry families has recently been surging and is expected to be most severe during the ‘barley hump’ between April and June,” a source in Yanggang Province told Daily NK last Friday.
In the past, families have generally gone hungry during the barley hump (a lean time between harvests) in April according to the lunar calendar. But the source explained that more recently, families have started to run out of food much earlier than that — sometimes as early as the beginning of the year. The chronic shortage of food appears to be getting even worse as agriculture is disrupted by natural disasters and COVID-19.
Families are starving for lack of food not only in rural regions but also in the cities, the source said. That is less likely to happen in cities, where market activities are permitted, but in the countryside, the food shortage is so severe that an average of 40-70% of families are barely able to have one meal a day, he said. Meanwhile, 10-20% of families have completely run out of food.
These circumstances led to the recent death of a family in Hoeryong, a city in North Hamgyong Province, the source reported.
During the Fourth Plenary Meeting of the Eighth Central Committee, which was held at the end of 2021, North Korea’s leadership claimed that there had been “remarkable achievements and noticeable progress worthy of inspiring confidence in the agricultural sector, the sector most valued by the party.”
“It’s safe to regard official reports as being internal propaganda designed to convince North Koreans that the government has done a good job at cultivating a lot of food. They’re basically being told, ‘Don’t worry about food,’” the source said. In reality, he explained, people who work all year on collective farms receive little from the government.
“When farms bring in the fall harvest, they have to repay the government for the fertilizer they received and the machinery they borrowed, and they also have to send food to the military and various other organizations. In the end, the amount that’s left over for farmers isn’t enough for a single month,” the source added.
On top of only keeping a little of what they grow, families working on collective farms cannot count on rations from the government, either. The inevitable result is that some families will go hungry, he said.
The North Korean government has responded by ordering organizations to ensure that starving families receive some amount of food. But in most cases, the food distributed to the starving is collected from their neighbors by inminban, or people’s units. So those efforts are thought to increase the burden on struggling people in a country where everyone is short on food.
Under these circumstances, there are reportedly signs that North Koreans would like to receive food aid from South Korea and the international community.
“People could see bags of rice that said ‘Republic of Korea’ during the eras of the Supreme Leader [Kim Il Sung] and the General [Kim Jong Il], but nowadays it’s rare to even see any sacks from South Korea. People desperately want to receive food aid from South Korea and international organizations,” the source said.
“The desire for foreign aid has grown particularly strong as food shortages have worsened and market prices have risen because of the coronavirus. But North Koreans are unable to share their true feelings because the government tells them to fiercely resist kowtowing to other countries and to resolve problems on their own while emphasizing self-sufficiency,” the source said.
