North Korea faces food crisis ahead of landmark summit

North Korea has warned that it is facing a food shortfall of some 1.4 million tonnes this year, forcing the regime to almost halve rations.

An undated two-page memo from the North Korean mission to the United Nations, seen by Reuters, blames the shortages of rice, wheat, potatoes and soy beans on soaring temperatures, drought and floods that damaged crops last year.

The release of the document comes just a week before a landmark summit in Vietnam between Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump, the US president, during which the North Korean leader will seek an easing of US-led international sanctions that are slowing his country’s economic development.

The harsh sanctions were imposed to pressure the North Koreans to dismantle their nuclear and ballistic missiles programmes and Washington believes that insufficient progress has been made to allow financial penalties to be lifted.

While frequent natural disasters have contributed to long-term food insecurity in the pariah regime, so too have the policies of the Kim dynasty to pursue the creation of nuclear weapons and keep North Korea in perpetual isolation.

“The DPRK [North Korean] government calls on international organisations to urgently respond to addressing the food situation,” read the North Korean memo, reportedly a follow-up to a joint assessment with the World Food Programme late last year. The WFP declined to comment.

The memo revealed that the country’s food production last year was 4.951 million tonnes, 503,000 tonnes down on 2017. While food imports would make up some of the gap, daily rations would have to be cut from 550 to 300 grams.

On Thursday, a UN spokesperson said that aid officials were consulting the government to “further understand the impact of the food security situation on the most vulnerable people in order to take early action to address their humanitarian needs”.

Last year the United Nations and aid groups were only able to help one third of six million people in need due to a lack of funding.

Some 10 million people – about 40 per cent of the population – are undernourished and require humanitarian assistance. Despite the desperate need, the WFP has been unable to meet its funding goals.

In a statement to the Telegraph in November, it said that $7.5m was still needed over the next five months to avoid more cuts to food assistance.

It revealed that a “critical funding shortfall” in 2018 had already meant 190,000 children were deprived of nutritional support.

Historically, North Korea has struggled to feed its population through a combination of economic mismanagement, the withdrawal of Soviet support and a catastrophic famine in the 1990s during which an estimated 240,000 to 3.5m died from starvation or related diseases.

The country’s authorities have publicly acknowledged the existence of a nutrition problem.

“It is our goal to fully solve the food security problem by 2020, which is the final year of our five-year national development plan,” Professor Ri Gi Song, a leading economist at the Pyongyang Institute of Social Sciences, told the Telegraph in a previous interview.

However, Pyongyang’s recent memo also blamed UN sanctions for restricting the delivery of farming materials and hindering fuel supplies for the agriculture sector.

Stephen Biegun, the US special envoy for North Korea, said earlier this month that the US had eased rules on humanitarian assistance to the reclusive regime, and was working to clear a backlog of UN approvals.