World

Kim Jong Un delivers year-end speech on North Korea’s ‘food problem’ – Henry Club

January 1, 2022
Bharat Times English News

A brief reference was made to “emergency epidemic prevention work” at the end of the year, summarized by state media outlet KCNA on Saturday.

North Korea remained silent during the pandemic cut yourself even more from the rest of the world and have not admitted a single domestic case of Covid-19.
Much of Kim’s speech focused on the need to boost agricultural productivity in the country. He also praised the military progress made during his tenth year in power But apart from brief references to policy directives for inter-Korean relations and foreign affairs, no specific mention was made of neither South Korea nor the US.

While the North Korean leader did not give details of the degree of food shortage, the World Food Organization warned of serious shortages in the country in 2021, including a shortage of hundreds of thousands of tons of rice.

The problem was compounded by severe floods in some of the country’s most fertile rice-producing regions.

This isn’t the first time Kim has acknowledged the state of food in the country over the past 12 months.

In April, KCNA reported that Kim, while addressing a top-level political meeting, urged people to organize another “tough march”.

The term “hard march” refers to a period of devastating famine in the early 1990s, when North Korea’s economy slowed after the collapse of the Soviet Union, cutting off aid flows to the country.

It was estimated that hundreds of thousands of people – or up to 10% of the country’s population – died of hunger during this period.

And in juneKim acknowledged that the country was facing a “stressful food situation” due to the 2020 hurricanes and floods. That same month, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) estimated that North Korea was short of about 860,000 tonnes of food – which would have been enough for just two months’ supply.

On Saturday, KCNA also reported Kim’s acceptance of “adverse conditions this year” and his desire to “increase agricultural production and fully solve the country’s food problem”.

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