North Koreans starve amid regime’s military spending, arms deal with Russia
FORUM Staff
North Korea’s rural economy is in “a terrible situation,” the isolated nation’s dictator said in late January 2024, admitting a “failure to satisfactorily provide the people in local areas with basic living necessities including condiments, foodstuff and consumption goods,” the state-run Korean Central News Agency reported.
Days after Kim Jong Un’s admission, North Korean diplomats met in Pyongyang with the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) vice foreign minister. Kim is seeking to strengthen his regime’s relationship with Beijing after bolstering ties with Moscow by transferring arms to Russia for its illegal war against Ukraine.
Some of North Korea’s 9.66 million rural residents are starving while Kim emphasizes a costly military buildup, and his regime continues to depend on the Chinese Communist Party under General Secretary Xi Jinping. The PRC is North Korea’s main ally and leading trading partner, providing most of its food and energy.
An estimated 60 percent of North Koreans, or 15 million citizens, were living in absolute poverty as of 2020 and couldn’t sustain basic needs of food, shelter, drinking water, education and medical care, according to researchers at the Vienna University of Economics and Business in Austria.
The United States mission to the United Nations said in October 2023 that Kim’s regime shipped more than 1,000 containers of arms and munitions to Russia in violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions prohibiting North Korean arms exports.
North Korea’s centrally planned economy was worth $24.5 billion in 2022, German broadcaster Deutsche Welle reported in February 2024. After the arms transfer, Moscow released $9 million in frozen North Korean assets and also may help Pyongyang sidestep economic sanctions by providing access to international banking networks, The New York Times newspaper reported.
The payment from Russia equates to less than $1 per North Korean rural resident. The regime intends to use the money to buy crude oil, the Times reported.
With North Korea’s economy ravaged by international sanctions over the regime’s nuclear weapons and missile programs, as well as by the COVID-19 pandemic, the ruling party recently tasked a committee with trying to develop rural regions facing widespread poverty and food insecurity. Military spending, meanwhile, accounts for nearly 16% of North Korea’s gross domestic product (GDP), according to state media, and has represented as much as 26% of GDP in recent years. The economy contracted for the third consecutive year in 2022, and the country’s manufacturing industry shrank for a sixth consecutive year, Radio Free Asia reported.
North Korea suffered a catastrophic famine in the 1990s in which an estimated 600,000 to 1 million people died. Chronic food shortages are the product of the regime’s decades of economic mismanagement.
“Put simply, North Korea teeters on the brink of famine,” the Stimson Center, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, reported in 2023.
The growing magnitude of food insecurity was highlighted in a February 2024 report by Seoul’s Unification Ministry based on interviews with more than 6,300 North Korean defectors. Most of the respondents who resettled in South Korea over the past decade said they never received government rations in the North and relied on makeshift markets to make money to survive, according to Reuters. Some said nearly 70% of their family’s income came from such informal sources.
“We could confirm that the North Korean residents’ housing, medical and educational environments are still underdeveloped, and marketization continues in many aspects of their livelihoods for survival,” Unification Minister Kim Yung-ho said.
