North Korean authorities have recently cracked down on rice and corn vendors in Hyesan, Daily NK has learned.
“Individuals selling rice or corn in Hyesan’s marketplaces and streets have recently been stopped by law enforcement officials, who say that staple foods such as rice and corn can only be sold at state-run grain stores and that individuals are only allowed to sell non-staple foods such as soybeans, barley and potatoes,” a source in Yanggang Province told Daily NK on Tuesday, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Vendors have generally been able to sell rice and corn as long as they hid them in sacks and bribed government enforcers with a pack of cigarettes. But law enforcement has cracked down on such behavior in recent months, the source said.
In early February, police officers in Hyesan organized meetings with neighborhood watch units and urged citizens to buy their grain from official stores. During these meetings, police also warned that individuals caught selling rice in secret would face confiscation, fines, and legal consequences.
More recently, the police have enlisted street monitors in their enforcement campaign, which has provoked anger among both grain sellers and buyers, the source said.
“Consumers are bitter that they have lost the freedom to buy rice as they please. Of course, they would buy rice from the government stores if it were in their interest. But they don’t because they can’t buy the exact amount they want at the stores, or they can’t buy on credit because they live hand-to-mouth. That’s why they go to individual vendors,” the source said.
“The government stores are also supposed to sell small amounts of grain, but if people only want to buy a few hundred grams, the clerks get irritated and angry. Besides, people have little reason to buy grain from the state-run stores when their prices aren’t much different from those of individual vendors.”
One person who sells rice for a living told Daily NK: “If the state-run stores functioned normally and sold things for less than the marketplaces, the vendors would have to close up shop even without a crackdown by the authorities. On top of business being bad, the authorities are on my back, so I don’t know how I’m going to make ends meet. I think it would make more sense to just become a beggar.”
The source further reported that “given the crackdown, individual rice vendors may go underground for a while, but they won’t disappear completely because they need to make a living somehow. Enforcers who are on good terms with the vendors tell them to keep their heads down during the current crackdown because the authorities will soon turn their attention elsewhere.
“People talk about how hard it is just to put food on the table and how tired they are of the daily struggle. No wonder people grumble that well-fed officials spend all their time plotting ways to catch people in some sort of wrongdoing.”
Translated by David Black. Edited by Robert Lauler.
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