North Korea is facing its worst drought for 16 years, with even its propaganda machine admitting conditions are “abysmal”.
Farmers are being forced to plant rice in dried up fields, the United Nations said, as it called for humanitarian aid to be given to the rogue state.
According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture organisation (FAO), which has carried out surveys in North Korea’s South Hwanghae province, a lack of rainfall earlier in the year has badly damaged both this year’s early crops, which have been harvested, and the main rice crop which is due to be harvested in the autumn.
Wet rice agriculture depends on elaborate irrigation systems which direct water from rivers and reservoirs along networks of channels to flood paddy fields prior to planting. But even after rains earlier this month, water levels are so low that farmers are being forced to put seedlings into dry earth. Harvests of early crops, such as wheat, barley, and potatoes, are 30 per cent less abundant than usual.
Kim Jong-un’s official party newspaper has reported the existence of an “abysmal drought”, a rare admission of vulnerability in a country where a million or more people died in a famine kept secret 20 years ago.
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“The drought . . . has ‘pushed away’ the supposed rainy season we needed for the barley production,” the Rodong Sinmun (Workers’ Newspaper) reported in June. The article was headlined: “Let the entire Party, the entire country, and the entire people unite to battle the drought.”
The FAO says that the harvest of cereal crops is even lower than the drought year of 2001. It is appealing for humanitarian aid for the North, at a time when the rest of the world is imposing sanctions on Pyongyang in punishment for its ongoing nuclear and ballistic missile tests.
“What is now urgently need is to ensure adequate food consumption for the most vulnerable population groups, through increased commercial imports and also food aid,” said Cristina Coslet of the FAO.
In the late 1990s, as many as a few million people died in a famine now known euphemistically in North Korea as the “Arduous March”. The regime blamed it on catastrophic floods, but its roots lay in decades of mismanagement which have left the North chronically unable to feed itself. Flat arable land is scarce and much of the country’s food is grown on mountain slopes which have been deforested for firewood, and are easily washed away in heavy rain.
Since the collapse of its Cold War partnerships with the former communist bloc and the aid and ready markets which they provided, the country’s economy has shrunk disastrously, and agricultural techniques are primitive with inadequate drainage and protective ditches.
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Some economists express scepticism about how serious the food shortages will turn out to be, pointing out that food prices in North Korean markets show no sign of increasing drastically. North Korea itself does not make such statistics public, but estimates from South Korea suggest that, despite drought and sanctions, its economy is doing well overall.
South Korea’s national bank estimates that North Korea’s economy grew by 3.9 per cent in 2016, the biggest increase since 1999. This compares to a 1.1 per cent contraction in 2015, caused by drought.
The growth appears to be a result of the covert liberalisation of the economy being pursued by Kim Jong-un. Increasingly, farmers and factory managers are being allowed to make business decisions for themselves, rather than submitting to the diktats of central economic planners.