North Korea's Kim admits food situation 'tense'
Kim Jong Un has admitted that North Korea's food situation is "tense", state media reported Wednesday, sounding the alarm in a country that suffered a devastating famine in the 1990s in which hundreds of thousands died. The impoverished country, which is under multiple sets of international sanctions over its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programmes, has long struggled to feed itself, suffering chronic food shortages. And last year the coronavirus pandemic and a series of summer storms and floods added yet more pressure on the flagging economy. At a plenary meeting of the central committee of the ruling Workers' Party of Korea, Kim said the economy improved this year, with industrial output growing 25 percent from a year earlier, the official KCNA news agency reported Wednesday. But there had been a "series of deviations" due to a number of challenges, the North Korean leader added. "The people's food situation is now getting tense as the agricultural sector failed to fulfil its grain production plan due to the damage by typhoon last year," Kim said. A series of typhoons last summer triggered floods that destroyed thousands of homes and inundated farmland. Kim called for...