KIM JONG UN’S NEW YEAR RESOLUTION: MORE FOOD
Kim Jong Un has begun his second decade as North Korea’s leader with a vow to alleviate the country’s chronic food shortages — a problem he inherited from his late father 10 years ago and has yet to fix.
One of the first promises that Kim made 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, the 37-year-old leader issued a rare warning that the North faced a “tense” food situation, brought about by the coronavirus pandemic and international sanctions against his nuclear weapons programme.
At a Workers Party meeting earlier this month, Kim pledged to “increase agricultural production and completely solve the food problem”, specifying production goals “to be attained phase by phase in the coming 10 years,” the Korean Central News Agency reported.
But he did not appear to introduce any significant agricultural measures, except to forgive all cooperative farms’ debts to the government. He mainly repeated old exhortations to farmers to use more machines, greenhouses, fertilisers 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. But North Koreans have paid a harsh price for Kim’s nuclear ambitions.
The United Nations has imposed economic sanctions that have banned all of the North’s major exports. The country’s economy shrank by 3.5% in 2017 and by 4.1% in 2018, according to estimates from the South Korean central bank. After a slight recovery in 2019, a contraction of 4.5% was estimated in 2020.
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 totalled only 4.69 million tonnes in 2021, leaving a shortage of 800,000 tonnes, according to estimates released by South Korea’s Rural Development Administration. The US Department of Agriculture estimated in July last year that 16.3 million people in the North — 63.1% of the population — were “food insecure”.
In the past, North Korea has made up for its agricultural shortfalls with foreign aid and imports. But in response to the pandemic, it has rejected outside aid and shut its borders, making it harder to import fertilisers or farm equipment from China, the North’s only major trading partner and donor. Pandemic restrictions have also hurt the country’s unofficial markets, which helped circulate food.
Kim’s emphasis on bolstering food production indicates that North Korea will stick to his “self-reliant” economic policy while it copes with the pandemic, analysts say. The North has also braced for a prolonged diplomatic confrontation with Washington since Kim’s diplomacy with former US president Donald Trump collapsed in 2019.
North Korea has claimed it had no Covid-19 cases, and it has rejected offers of millions of vaccine doses, leaving its population vulnerable to explosive outbreaks should its borders reopen. It has also rejected the Biden administration’s offer to resume dialogue “without preconditions”, insisting that Washington must first end what the North calls its “hostile policy”.
At the same time, North Korea has resumed missile tests, showing that it continues to develop increasingly sophisticated, nuclear-capable weaponry — Kim’s most valuable leverage.
“His extremely cursory mention of inter-Korean relations and foreign policy indicates that North Korea was not ready to come out for contacts with South Korea or the United States in the new year,” said Cheong Seong-chang, director of the Center for North Korean Studies at the Sejong Institute outside Seoul.
“Faced with the pandemic, North Korea is expected to continue to keep its borders shut, focusing on self-reliance and conducting only the minimum of essential trade with China.”