12 ms·
North Korean market prices suggest serious food shortages
- boomboomsubban 3y agoHasn't most of the world had a similar rise in food price over this period? Wouldn't that naturally negatively impact the poorest, such as the North Koreans?
- nordsieck 3y ago> Hasn't most of the world had a similar rise in food price over this period? Wouldn't that naturally negatively impact the poorest, such as the North Koreans? How much food does North Korea import? My understanding is that North Korea is extremely isolated from the rest of the world; to the extent that that is true, it isolates them from global inflation in food prices.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- paulddraper 3y agoNot just food, but energy and machinery as well. And North Korea does have imports, mostly from China.
- Scoundreller 3y agoWhy only sell production locally when you can export for hard currency?
- kneebonian 3y agoNK imports almost all their calories. The problem is at the start of COVID they shut down all imports into the country and that has made survival nearly impossible for many people.
- Beached 3y agonk domestically produces about 2/3 of it's total food supply. and they are getting better at domestic fertilizer production and increasing the amount of land under the plow every year. their main issue with domestic food self reliance is largely two things. low grade and low volume fertilizer, and natural disasters (typhoons and droughts). NK is like 2 or 3 good years in a row away from being able to produce it's food domesticly
- SoftTalker 3y agoThey are isolated but they do import food, mainly rice and wheat products, from China and to a lesser extent Russia (according to Wikipedia).
- distortionfield 3y agoThe article says those Chinese imports have largely dried up though
- boomboomsubban 3y agoIt said they did during COVID, and that you can see prices stabilized as trade resumes.
- Scoundreller 3y agoProbably impacts the poorest countries the most since the last mile portion of food is a lower proportion of their end user price.
- syntaxing 3y agoTangentially related but this is one of the most fascinating thing about China. The last famine they had ended around 1961. That means that people who are in their sixties probably knew someone that starved to death. Imagine being born to a country where people were starving to death to a prosperous country within your lifetime.
- moelf 3y agobut the great famine was very much man(Mao)-made... of course the economic boom was a great achievement, but it's different from what you're suggesting I think.
- balder1991 3y agoAlso loosely related, the Homo Deus book has a chapter about how humans conquered technically what it classifies as the major challenges that we attributed to gods, including hunger, plagues, and war. It mentions that nowadays, if any of these things cause human destruction it is a political thing and someone somewhere wants that to happen.
- onlyrealcuzzo 3y agoTechnologically, what do we have that stops famines from happening? Like, are we really immune from some mega drought occuring somewhere that mostly depends on rainfall? Or is that just extremely unlikely to happen, especially at a large scale?
- MattGaiser 3y agoA lot of this probably depends on who "we" refers to. I would imagine that many regions are not immune to a mega drought. For the West specifically, wealthier nations can kind of just export the shortage by paying more for supplies that would go elsewhere. The West also feeds most of its crops to animals, so that is an area for relatively easy reduction in an emergency. 67% of what is grown in the USA is animal food. But that proportion is dramatically lower in places like India. https://www.vox.com/2014/8/21/6053187/cropland-map-food-fuel-animal-feed https://www.vox.com/2014/8/21/6053187/cropland-map-food-fuel...
- beebmam 3y ago[flagged]
- everfree 3y agoLast time I checked, North Korea is an authoritarian dictatorship. Edit: Not a Marxist society.
- TulliusCicero 3y agoThose things can both be true to an extent. You can have a market economy without democracy.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- CWuestefeld 3y agoare all those things mutually exclusive?
- cowpig 3y agoI think it depends whether you're talking about the philosophy or Karl Marx, or the philosophy of dictatorships that kind of started from some "Marxist" roots and kept the name
- Kamq 3y ago> about the philosophy or Karl Marx I don't think laymen really ever are referring to this. And if they do, they will usually clarify (or it will be obvious because it's in the context on something like the book Kapital). Same with the term communist. Unless you're in a philosophy discussion, people mean the real-world factions that called themselves this and controlled (or still control) countries. Those are the only communists to have enough power to be relevant to most laymen.
- VoodooJuJu 3y agoAh, yes, it's not Real Socialism.
- photochemsyn 3y agoI'm sure news coming from an organization controlled by a foundation whose CEO is a retired US military general is entirely reliable and unbiased, and should be taken at face value without any qualms.
- HumblyTossed 3y agoI get the point you're trying to make, but it is possible
- kstrauser 3y agoThey link to all their sources. Do you disagree with the facts they quote, or the conclusions they reached from those facts?
- fein 3y agoI'll call bullshit on it then. The sources they cite are unverifiable, to the point where you can make up whatever you like and I'm just expected to assume it's true because "journalistic integrity" I have no faith nor trust in journalists in current year. Even more so about anything to do with NK.
- hedora 3y agoFrom the graphs in the article, the current price of rice is 5 and it was 4 pre-pandemic. The unit of the price is in foreign currency, and we know there has been significant inflation in the last few years, so that looks like it is showing no significant change from then to now. There were spikes during border closings during the pandemic, but this is in a border region where smuggling is prevalent, and the spikes are in foreign-currency based prices. They don’t have a way to normalize for effects such as less supply of foreign goods leading to less demand for foreign currency (which could have caused the foreign currency’s value to temporarily crash inside the black market.)
- Freestyler_3 3y agoThe prices in my supermarket have gone up more than the prices in north korea.
- tommoor 3y agoThe BBC did a good piece on this a few weeks ago that includes multiple interviews with people in NK https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiviOdWDl9o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiviOdWDl9o
- simion314 3y agoAny idea why China and Russia keep North Korea in such a bad shape, it is not in their interest to not have this regime collapse and get "infected" with freedom and human rights?
- toxicFork 3y agoDo you mean why they don't let it die?
- simion314 3y agoAre they helping? From the BBC article I read a week ago the people are starving, so they are letting them die, is bad PR at least for Russia that points at N Korea as an ally and friend and a model of a country that is not "degenerate"
- mcpackieh 3y agoIf there are 10 starving people and I feed 9 of them, am I helping?
- Fauntleroy 3y agoThey don't run the place, and they simply keep it propped up as a proxy defense against the "Western" South Korea.
- dmix 3y agoThe fact that countries like Venezuela struggle to feed their own people in the modern era, during the time of greatest abundance and production, while the bulk of the world figured out food production/trade a century ago really blows my mind. Not sure how people tolerate that sort of thing and still pretend the economic system is a good idea. Or hand wave it away that it's all some foreign conspiracy. Iran is sanctioned, CIA works against them, etc too but they still managed to feed their people over the last decade plus (ignoring the recent global food crisis). Edit: the Iran analogy might have been a poor choice, they recently enacted Venezuelan style price controls. Idk why governments think they can make things cheaper simply by just saying "this is now the new price and you can't change it". > The Central Bank of the Islamic Republic of Iran began direct payments in the form of cash subsidies to Iran's public instead, with the government deploying an electronic coupon system as a form of price control to prevent price gouging in place of the import subsidies. > Despite Raisi promising that "prices on wheat, medicine, and petrol will not increase in any circumstances", the price of some food products rose by over 300%. Price controls always amplify existing supply issues and are used as short-term Bandaids to mask more fundamental issues. https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2019/01/iran-inflation-price-controls-economy-sanctions-rouhani.html https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2019/01/iran-inflation-...
- hedora 3y agoFood was weaponized a long time ago. Modern famines generally are not due to lack of resources or economic problems.
- marktl 3y agoWhy doesn't SK find a way to feed the north in hopes for good propaganda and perhaps save a few lives? Or do they? Entirely uneducated on the subject, just seems an obvious win/win.
- hulitu 3y ago> When comparing current price levels with historical ones, the overall picture suggests that market prices, since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the resulting border closure by the North Korean government, have moved to a consistently higher level, which indicates that the country’s overall food supply is lower. The same thing happened in EU countries. Shall we conclude that there is a food shortage in EU ?