Bizarre! North Korea asks people to ‘eat less’ till 2025 amid food shortage

The food crisis has resulted from a shutdown of North Korea’s border with China, typhoons and floods last summer that destroyed crops.

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New Delhi: North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has reportedly asked people to consume less amid food crisis that is expected to last till 2025. 

Kim blamed a ''series of deviations'' for the shortage of food supplies and said, ''The people's food situation is now getting tense as the agricultural sector failed to fulfill its grain production plan.''

In June this year, Kim had urged officials to find ways to boost agricultural production, saying the country's food situation "is now getting tense", as per PTI report.

A source told Radio Free Asia (RFA), “Two weeks ago, they told the neighborhood watch unit meeting that our food emergency would continue until 2025.”

The food crisis has resulted from a shutdown of North Korea’s border with China, which was imposed in 2020 in order to stem the transmission of COVID-19. The North's economy has declined further amid border closures, which has cut off trade with China. The typhoons and floods last summer have decimated crops in the North making the situation worse. 

Due to border closure with China, North Korea’s economy has been hit hard as food prices have spiked, leading to starvation deaths among its population of 25 million. 

''Authorities emphasised that the possibility of reopening customs between North Korea and China before 2025 was very slim,” Fox News cited RFA’s report. 

"Some of the residents are saying that the situation right now is so serious they don’t know if they can even survive the coming winter," another source, in Sinuiju, North Korea, told RFA.

In May, the Korea Development Institute, a South Korean government think tank, had predicted that the North could face food shortages of around a million tons this year.

(With agency inputs)