North Korea is having serious food crisis

The North Korean regime has cut official food rations down to 300 grams per person per day after the worst harvest in a decade in the country. More than ten million North Koreans are suffering "severe food shortages" due to a series of weather disasters, compounded by international sanctions on the country.

Hyderabad: While its leader Kim Jong-un has been trying to improve ties with South Korea, the US, China and Russia, reeling under sanctions for the country's nuclear programmes - North Korea is staring at a severe crisis albeit of the non-nuclear type.

It is shortage of food thanks to poor harvest caused by dry spells, heatwaves and flooding. A UN report says that the country is in serious troubles over food if something is not done to redress the situation, reports Al Jazeera.

The UN assessment is based on the surveys in North Korea in the recent months by United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and World Food Programme (WFP) missions.

The surveys revealed that about 10 million north Koreans were suffering from severe food crisis and their food rations have been reduced significantly. In the mid- nineties North Korea suffered a severe famine that wiped out about 3 million people. This time around the situation is not famine like but nevertheless a serious one.

What needs to be done to ward off any food shortage in the country is to adopt better agricultural practices. But international sanctions have crippled North Korea so much that it can hardly make any efforts towards bettering its agricultural methods.

North Korea now needs better seeds, better fertilizers, better agricultural equipments and a host of other allied facilities, suggests the UN bodies.

But it seems that Kim Jong-un is caught in a bind. He cannot abandon his nuclear programmes for fear of losing personal power and the country's sovereignty, and yet cannot deal with country's economic woes because of the sanctions imposed on account of his nuclear programmes. The only way that Kim has taken recourse to is to better the already good ties with China and Russia and get more things from these two to meet the crises that his country is suffering from.

This policy helps Kim to a considerable extent during normal times, but when a critical situation like food shortages arises, the unchallenged leader of North Korea faces his strongest challenge.