The Koreas

What North Korea’s Markets Could Tell Us About Its Food Security


By Benjamin Katzeff Silberstein for
What North Korea’s Markets Could Tell Us About Its Food Security
Credit: Flickr/ (stephan)

In early May, the United Nation’s World Food Program (WFP) and the Food and Agriculture Organization warned that 40 percent of North Korea’s population – 10.1 million people – “are food insecure and in urgent need of food assistance.” In findings based off a two-week fact-finding trip to North Korea, the WFP and FAO report blamed “[p]rolonged dry spells [and] abnormally high temperatures and floods, coupled with limited supplies of agricultural inputs” for a particularly weak harvest last fall, leading to a food shortage in 2019.

The market factor in North Korea’s current food crisis sometimes seems unclear. Some have talked about the market compensating for what the state doesn’t provide in the event of a food shortage. But the WFP’s methodology should cover for that. They calculate not only collective farms yields specifically, but arable land and production in general. Their estimates may (it’s not entirely clear) be based on data for total farmland available provided by the state, and there are some types of plots that wouldn’t be covered in that case. But WFP uses satellite imagery to verify official information on production figures (see page 5 of their rapid food security assessment for North Korea).


So why are markets still so important to understand food security, and why is it a problem that the WFP cannot access them freely? Rest assured, this is not for a lack of trying. From pp. 6–8 (my emphasis added):





Especially in a country like North Korea, where access to food and sustenance is a political matter, distribution (or entitlements) is more important than total food production for food security. The markets are a crucial mechanism for distribution in North Korea. As long as the WFP isn’t allowed to survey them, and to do more extensive household surveys freely in the country, we won’t truly know what food security looks like.

