N. Korea Food Situation Continues to Worsen: Protests Continue in Chongjin; Food Prices Skyrocket; Kim Jong Il Asks China for ‘Massive’ Food Aid

[Update: A reader — one you and I both respect — writes to warn that we shouldn’t rely too heavily on the reports of Good Friends. Well, yes, the obvious caveats apply here: this being North Korea, we tend to treat third-hand rumors and hearsay, possibly further garbled by translation, as news. What I try to do here that news sites don’t do is to put each report in the context of other facts reported by other sources, either previously or concurrently. So yes, consider the obvious limitations of this source and I’ll try to keep a careful watch for other reports that corroborate these.]

With its food situation rapidly deteriorating, AFP reports that North Korea will ask China for “massive food aid” so that it does not have to submit to South Korean monitoring.

Reader and fellow blogger Jack has provided us the link to Good Friends’ latest installment of the North Korean Untergang. Food prices continue to rise and North Koreans continue to express their discontent. More North Koreans are fleeing into China, despite the regime’s imposition of severe new punishments for those who are caught. The long-suffering northeastern city of Chongjin appears to be the hungriest and angriest part of the country.

The price of rice has increased roughly 29% — from 1400 to 1800 won per kG — during the month of March, with the greatest increases occurring in the “core” areas of Pyongsong and the capital, Pyongyang. Prices will probably continue their rapid rise as existing stocks run out and will probably top 2,000 won soon. Food is a part of North Korea’s social stratification. Rice-eaters tend to be military or government officials. Corn-eaters are the have-nots. Ominously, Good Friends reports that corn prices have risen from 520 won per kG to 800 won (54%) since January, and to 900 won (73%) in Pyongyang and Sariwon. They will probably hit 1,000 won by next month.

There are more reports that industries are idle because the workers can’t be fed and lack the energy to get to work. Managers are responding, in some cases, by threatening to send starving people to concentration camps.

There are also some initial signs that the regime is having trouble feeding the military, despite its best efforts to squeeze everyone else:

In light of the situation, the National Defense Committee ordered each region to gather up as much rice as they can, regardless of the lack, for military use. In response, mangers of the local regions are expressing the sentiment that, “it’s a disaster that we have to collect military food to store while we lack even seed stocks. [Good Friends]

We also learn more about the still-unresolved (and possibly growing) protest movement in the northeastern city of Chongjin, led by young women angry that the regime has banned them from trading. This is a long quote, but this is also a remarkable and historic ocurrence for North Korea, because the women have overcome their fears and the regime’s fear of suppressing them is rising:

Even women passing by markets and women who did not participate in market activities joined the protests. Kang Myung-hee, a 47-year old female resident, said that “Middle aged married women went to the market management office and expressed their anger. As soon as one woman shouted that “˜give us rice,’ other women started shouting after her. Han Jeong-aeh, a 38-year old resident, said that “Do you [government officials] only care about your own survival? Let us trade so that we can live on our own. Otherwise, provide us with food rations! The state should offer us at least either one,” which was originally claimed at the protests. “Probably, if we were men, police officers would have arrested us,” she went on to say, “However, because we were women, they could not take any physical actions to us and rather felt impatient. Reportedly, police officers did not take any forceful actions after all.

The regime still cannot enforce the ban on women trading in the markets, although the central government continues to press the local authorities to do so. The regime is reportedly concerned that the protest will spread to other cities, including Sinuiju and Hamheung.

An official, too, of the Security Bureau said that “If we suppress these female protesters by force, it can only lead to a riot. That’s only making things worse. If these women get hurt, then workers would be the next group to strike. It is because any physical harm to women would affect their husbands and children and even provoke them. If you go out to the markets, you can see your neighbors, close relatives, and even your own sisters. Thus, any of our security guards are hard to imagine attacking them. The official added that as these female protesters did not use any violence–neither hurt others nor broke things and only expressed their anger and frustration with words–which sounded reasonable even to the police, any of officers could not even think of quelling them. More importantly, the protests took place when wives’ market activities were banned, while food rations for workers [husbands] completely stopped. As a result, authorities seemed more concerned about reactions of workers.

Women in Chongjin are also said to have protested the summary execution of the 15 people in Onsong I told you about here. The 15 were cross-border traders who were bringing in food on which others depended. Good Friends has previously reported on the widespead and openly expressed public outrage over the executions, something we haven’t seen before in North Korea. Good Friends sought out a security officer’s justification for the executions:

The bigger problem was the information leakage. Those women provided information about the inside system or market prices to outsiders. If people get to know that information trading could be a livelihood activity, it would be more problematic. If the public finds out that they earned money through informing the market prices through the linkage of their South Korea families, other people would do the same because it would be much easier than crossing the river. So the residents were not told the true reason; these women were executed not because of human trafficking or collusion to cross the river but because of selling internal information.

The stage seems set for the regime to order a violent crackdown. This seems to be unfolding in pretty much the way I had predicted here. Chongjin isn’t far from the Russian and Chinese borders, and if there is a crackdown, the world may soon see images of wounded refugees, including women, being ferried across the rivers.

If the security forces can hold together, and assuming they’re still deployable from one region to another, the regime will survive a few localized protests in the short term; in the medium term, however, a violent crackdown by a sagging regime increases the danger that the security forces will fracture — think Timisoara — or it could also presage the rise of an organized resistance movement.

See also: Kang Chol Hwan’s analysis.