North Korea leader vows to correct food shortage
Kim Jong Un, beginning second decade as ruler, says he will fix country’s chronic lack of food
SEOUL — Kim Jong Un has begun his second decade as North Korea’s leader with a vow to alleviate the country’s chronic food shortages, state media reported on Saturday — a problem he inherited from his late father 10 years ago and has yet to fix.
Kim, 37, presided over a fiveday meeting of North Korea’s ruling Workers’ Party, which drew more attention than usual because it came at the end of his first decade in power.
On Saturday, New Year’s Day, the North’s state media carried lengthy reports on the meeting. They mentioned no diplomatic overtures from Kim toward the United States or South Korea, and only a brief reiteration of his frequent promise to increase the North’s military power. But much space was devoted to the subject of food shortages, which many analysts see as the biggest shortcoming of Kim’s leadership.
One of the first promises Kim made after inheriting power from his father, Kim Jong Il, a decade ago was that long-suffering North Koreans would “never have to tighten their belt again.” But that goal has remained elusive. Several months ago, Kim issued a rare warning the North faced a “tense” food situation, brought about by the coronavirus pandemic and international sanctions against his nuclear weapons program.
At the party meeting that ended Friday, Kim pledged to “increase the agricultural production and completely solve the food problem,” specifying production goals “to be attained phase by phase in the coming 10 years,” the North’s Korean Central News Agency said.
But Kim did not appear to introduce any significant agricultural measures, except to forgive all cooperative farms’ debts to the government. He mainly repeated the party’s old exhortations to farmers to use more machines, greenhouses, fertilizers and pesticides. He also said they should “grasp the greatness and gratitude for the party, state and the social system” and make “collectivism dominate their thinking and life.”
Under Kim’s rule, North Korea has become one of the very few countries that can threaten the United States with a nuclear missile. Of the six nuclear tests the North has carried out, four were under his watch.
Kim’s government has also tested three intercontinental ballistic missiles it claims could deliver nuclear warheads to part or all of the United States. As the North’s nuclear threat grew in 2018 and 2019, former President Donald Trump met three times with Kim, in the first summit talks between the two nations.
But North Koreans have paid a harsh price for Kim’s nuclear ambitions.
The United Nations imposed economic sanctions that banned all of the North’s major exports. The country’s economy shrank by 3.5 percent in 2017 and by
4.1 percent in 2018, according to estimates from South Korea’s central bank. It recovered slightly in 2019, but then the pandemic hit, forcing the North deeper into isolation. Its economy shrank again in 2020, by 4.5 percent.
Kim’s efforts to get the sanctions lifted collapsed in 2019, when his diplomacy with Trump ended with no agreement. At a Workers’ Party congress in January, Kim admitted his efforts to rebuild the North’s moribund economy had failed.
There are no signs that North Korea is in danger of the kind of devastating famine that it suffered in the late 1990s. But its grain production totaled only 4.69 million tons this year, leaving a shortage of 800,000 tons, according to estimates released by South Korea’s Rural Development Administration. In July, the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimated 16.3 million people in the North — 63.1 percent of the population — were “food insecure.”