“North Korean leader Kim Jong Un warned about possible food shortages and urged the country to brace for extended COVID-19 restrictions as he opened a major political conference to discuss national efforts to salvage a broken economy,” ABC News reported on Wednesday, June 16, 2001 (read story here).
“The North’s economy has deteriorated amid pandemic border closures, which choked off trade with China, while devastating typhoons and floods last summer decimated crops,” ABC News said.
There’s nothing new about famine in North Korea, and while you can’t blame the pandemic, typhoons, or floods on their communist system, an inefficient economy doesn’t exactly help, either. North Korea, one of the world’s last remaining communist nations, is also one of the poorest. You can’t order the ground to produce crops, no matter how many indoctrination camps or prisons you build.
One thing’s for certain, though: Under North Korean communism, deprivation isn’t equally distributed. Its leader has a weight problem.