North Korean authorities recently ordered that Pyongyang residents be provided with 20 days’ worth of food ahead of the Party Foundation Day holiday on Oct. 10.
With the authorities running into difficulty providing food even to Pyongyang since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, North Korea appears to have ordered a provision of food ahead of the state holiday to earn good will.
According to a Daily NK source on Monday, Pyongyang’s party committee and people’s committee ordered the provision of 20 days’ worth of food to the city’s residents on Sept. 17 to mark the upcoming Party Foundation Day holiday.
The next day, Pyongyang’s party committee convened an emergency meeting with the heads of district and county-level organizations to discuss how to acquire the food.
At the meeting, the city’s chief party secretary told leading officials from district and county people’s committees and local workplaces that they “shouldn’t just sit at their desks, but lead by example by directly heading to their assigned collective farms to secure food.”
The source said Pyongyang’s people’s committee provided five day’s worth of food on four occasions in May and June.
“However, this time they are providing 20 days’ worth of food all at once,” he said.
Ordinary people have suffered woeful food shortages because North Korea distributes food imported through the port of Nampo to “important” places such as party, security and police institutions in Pyongyang. Everyone else gets whatever remains.
North Korea has designated specific farms in the two Hwanghae and two Pyongan provinces as bases to provide food to Pyongyang residents. However, with typhoons and torrential rains causing so much crop damage this year, providing food to Pyongyang residents this autumn may prove difficult.
The source said Pyongyang’s municipal authorities are scrambling to secure food to soothe sentiment in the capital ahead of the Party Foundation Day holiday.
In fact, since the emergency meeting on Sept. 17, leading officials with the city’s district and county people’s committees have reportedly rushed to provincial areas to secure food.
With this year’s harvest looking grim, the officials plan to lodge on-site, sending rice, corn and other grains to Pyongyang as soon as farmers finish threshing it.
The source said realistically speaking, it would not be easy to provide normal rations even to residents of Pyongyang beyond the one or two months of the harvest season.
“In fact, [the authorities] are trying to stop public unrest by providing Pyongyang residents with food for Party Foundation Day, which coincides with autumn, when they can secure the most amount of grain,” he said.
The source also said that people in the provinces are unhappy about the situation.
“Provincial residents are complaining that the army or Pyongyang take everything they farm for the year, and they can’t get even their share,” he said.
Please direct any comments or questions about this article to dailynkenglish@uni-media.net.
