Leader slams advisers as economy sinks

SEOUL — North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has ripped into the performance of his Cabinet and fired a senior economic official he appointed a month ago, saying they’d failed to come up with new ideas to salvage an economy in decay.

The report by state media on Friday comes during the most daunting period of Kim’s nineyear rule. The diplomacy he had hoped would lift U.S.led sanctions over his nuclear program is stalemated, and pandemic border closures and cropkilling natural disasters last year deepened the damage to an economy broken by decades of policy failures, including a famine in the 1990s.

The border closure caused trade volume with China, the main source of support for North Korea’s economy, to drop by 75% in the first 10 months of the year. Shortages of raw materials caused factory output to plunge to its lowest level since Kim took power in 2011, and prices of imported foods like sugar quadrupled, according to South Korea’s spy agency.

Some analysts say the current challenges may set up conditions in the North that destabilizes markets and triggers public panic and unrest.

The current challenges have forced Kim to publicly admit that past economic plans hadn’t succeeded. A new fiveyear plan to develop the economy was issued during the ruling Workers’ Party congress in January, but Kim’s comments during the party’s Central Committee meeting that ended Thursday were rich with frustration over how the plans have been executed so far.

During Thursday’s session, Kim lamented that the Cabinet was failing in its role as the key institution managing the economy, saying it was producing unworkable plans while displaying no “innovative viewpoint and clear tactics.”

He said the Cabinet’s targets for agricultural production this year were set unrealistically high. And targets for electricity production were set too low, he said, showing a lack of urgency when shortages could stall work at coal mines and other industries.

The U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization estimates that nearly half of North Koreans are undernourished.