Reliable Source: Widespread Crop Failures in NE North Korea

When I say reliable, you’re just going to have to trust me on this, because this person, M, has received the full Judith Miller no-rat guarantee. This person is telling the truth, and has a sufficient basis of knowledge to know what the truth is.

M is a member of a Christian charity who recently returned from North Korea. The charity has multiple facilities that produce and/or distribute food. Recently, the charity was informed by the NK authorities that most (but not all) of the facilities will have to close by year’s end, which doesn’t worry M excessively, since M is convinced that the apparatchiks were monopolizing the output of all those other facilities for themselves anyway. Members of M’s organization had previously believed that they were feeding tens of thousands of hungry kids per day. Now, because they know more about the diversion of food they can’t distribute themselves, they realize that the true number is only a few hundred.

Crops in the northeast have simply failed. Allow me to return home for an example. I planted a small patch of corn behind my house this year. Being from ranching stock, I waited until May to plant it, and (as with Jasper Becker’s report of Kim Il Sung’s infamous on-the-spot guidance) planted the rows too close together. The corn was in excellent soil and had plenty of water, but perhaps not enough sunlight. Initially, the corn grew fast, but it suddenly decided to call it a year in early September. By that time, the stalks were six feet tall and had tassels and ears. From a distance, it looked like a perfectly fine corn crop. Someone viewing it from a satellite would have reached the same conclusion. But as the leaves turned brown, I could see a different story inside the ears, the parts that really matter. First, the ears were small–some no larger than the highlighter marker I’m looking at now. Second, the cobs were not completely covered with kernels; there were numerous bare spots, particularly on the ends. Picking through this failed experiment, and thinking of this report from the spring, I actually thought to myself, “so this is what the corn must look like in North Korea this year. Bear in mind that some of the more optimistic published estimates you will see come from two sources–USDA satellite photos, which are so famously superficial in their coverage that they might have predicted I’d still be barbecuing home-grown corn in late October, and North Korean government statistics.

The North Korean crop is much worse than this, at least in the northeast. M reports that the corn plants are small, stunted, and never even tasseled out, so I assume the plants never grew ears. M has been working in North Korea for years, and reports that this year’s crop is much worse than it has been in previous years. The northeast, of course, has traditionally been the North Korean government’s lowest-priority area for such items as fertilizer, pesticides, and fuel, and North Korea’s agricultural practices are very chemical-intensive.

Which brings up fuel. I asked M whether high fuel prices had visibly affected North Korea’s energy supply, or the amount of vehicular traffic. M reports that vehicular traffic and agricultural mechanization were already almost nil, so fuel prices have had no noticeable effect. As for electricity, M reports that even factories only have power 50% of the time.