Seoul, South Korea (AFP) — North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has opened a key party meeting to discuss agricultural development, state media said Monday, following a report of “grave” food shortages in the isolated country.
Normally such meetings are convened only once or twice a year, but the plenary comes just two months after a previous one, which also focused on agricultural issues.
The unusual frequency of the meetings focused on agriculture has fuelled speculation that there may be serious food shortages in North Korea now.
Kim chaired the opening on Sunday of a plenary meeting of top ruling party officials to “analyse and review… the programme for the rural revolution in the new era, and decide on the immediate important tasks and the urgent tasks,” the official Korean Central News Agency reported.
The participants “unanimously approved the agenda items and went into discussion” on the topic, the KCNA said without giving further details.
South Korea’s unification ministry says that there have been reports of starvation deaths in the North.
“We judge the food shortages there to be grave,” Koo Byoung-sam, the ministry spokesman, said last week, adding Pyongyang appeared to have requested food aid from the World Food Programme.
Nuclear-armed North Korea, which is under multiple sets of sanctions over its weapons programmes, has long struggled to feed itself.
It is highly vulnerable to natural disasters including floods and drought due to a chronic lack of infrastructure, deforestation and decades of state mismanagement.
This has been compounded by a years-long self-imposed border closure since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, which has only recently been eased to allow some trade with neighbouring China.
The country has periodically been hit by famines, one of which in the 1990s killed hundreds of thousands of people — some estimates range into millions.