Lee In-young, the unification minister responsible for ties with Pyongyang, has called for greater international support for the country’s 25m people as the nuclear-armed state faces food security and economic pressures stemming from tough sanctions, strict border closures and typhoon damage.
“We are watching North Korea very carefully with the concern that there might be a humanitarian crisis,”
Amid declining imports of food and fertiliser from China, analysts and diplomats believe North Korea, already one of the world’s poorest countries, faces its worst economic decline since the mid-1990s — when famine killed millions of people following severe droughts and the end of Soviet support.
The severity of food security problems in part now hinges on the next harvest after a brutally cold winter.
Lee, whose ministry closely tracks the North Korean economy, said immediate food shortages were “less likely” to reach the same extremes of the 1990s given the country’s advancements. But he stressed that the international community had to “think about whether North Korea’s food supply will be sustainable in the future”.
