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Background: Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, striking a delicate balance between sustaining economic activity and safeguarding public health has become a crucial concern. The border closures for COVID-19 prevention have further intensified concerns for North Korea, which conducts over 90% of its trade with China and Russia, countries sharing its borders. Methods: This study aims to scrutinize North Korea's response to these competing imperatives by examining the impact of border closures on the country's trade dynamics with China and Russia. This study employed the difference-in-difference (DID) method to analyze transformations in North Korea's economic activity before and after the border closures, utilizing trade data and nighttime satellite imagery captured in 2019 and 2020. Results: The results reveal that North Korea actively reoriented its trade priorities towards Russia and accorded precedence to its epidemic prevention system over its economy during the pandemic. A noticeable increase in imports of food and pharmaceuticals was observed, indicating a significant rise in the inflow of these essential commodities. Conclusion: The findings of this study suggest that during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, North Korea placed significant policy emphasis on preserving public health. However, due to economic hardships and food shortages, if the pandemic persists in the long term, it indicates the possibility of partial or complete lifting of border closures to mitigate these challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines governments' responses to food crises and famines in the nondemocratic world. After the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union, many of the remaining communist countries encountered an unprecedented level of food shortage and economic hardship, which, in turn, expedited or led to regime collapse. However, Cuba and North Korea are striking cases that have managed to survive the extreme situations from the 1990s onward. In this comparative-historical research, I argue that although the two countries implemented different coping strategies in light of domestic food distribution and international aid inducement, similar outcomes are observed in terms of regime survival. Despite the varied strategies, the state-mandated food politics were commonly mobilized through public rationing in these countries during the Cold War. This pre-crisis statecraft effectively disempowered the people, leaving them with a strong dependency on the state food systems and a weak voice of complaint against their governments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The food shortage in North Korea is a serious situation that has spanned the mid-1990s to today. North Korean refugee children, even those born in North Korea, China, or South Korea, had poor nutritional status at birth; thus, their growth and nutritional status should be continuously monitored. This review focused on the health status of North Korean children and the nutritional status of North Korean refugee children upon settling in South Korea. Immediately after entering South Korea, North Korean refugee children were shorter and lighter than South Korean children and had a serious nutritional status. Over time, their nutrition status improved, but they remained shorter and lighter than South Korean children. A new obesity problem was also observed. Therefore, it is necessary to continuously monitor their growth and nutritional status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the mid- and late 1990s in North Korea, a period marked by the "Arduous March", discourse shifted from "conquering" the natural environment to "rationally using and protecting" it. It is argued in this article that this change was related to the dynamic character of the North Korean regime, which evolves according to changing circumstances. Thus, this study aims to examine this change in discourse about the natural environment, focussing on features of North Korean discourses that directly demonstrate the government's identification of pending issues and its methods of address-ing them. It finds that the primary issues confronting the government during the Arduous March – overcoming food and economic crises and establishing the regime's superiority – and the methods to cope with these dilemmas closely factored into the change. To enhance the reliability of this study, we examined key outlets for discourses in North Korea, including collections of the Supreme Leader's speeches; newspapers and magazines published by the Korean Workers' Party; and articles in academic journals authored mainly by scholars vetted by the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article, based on newly available materials from the former Soviet archives, deals with the famine that struck a large part of the North Korean countryside in the winter of 1954–1955. The famine was related to the policies of crash industrialization and collectivization favored by Kim Il-sung—or at least, this is how many contemporaries, including Soviet diplomats, saw it. The famine, mentioned only once in openly available publications of the period, sparked political instability and prompted the urgent delivery of food assistance from the USSR and China. Soviet leaders, seeing the famine as another sign of the dangerous trends of Kim Il-Sung's policies, gave Pyongyang strong "advice," demanding a moderation of policies and partial halt of the collectivization drive. The "advice" was followed, but the entire confrontation contributed to the further buildup of tensions between Moscow and Kim Il-Sung. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on nuclear armament options chose by North Korea and explore its current status and future prospects as a geopolitical risk. Topics discussed include nuclear program and ballistic missile tests pose a major geopolitical risk as a security threat, economic difficulties such as food, energy, and foreign exchange shortages and sanctions against North Korea over its nuclear tests in accordance with United Nations Security Council resolutions.

In the 1990s, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) suffered from severe food shortages and large-scale deforestation, which triggered a stage of rural conservation reform. Since 2004, with support from the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), North Korea’s Ministry of Land and Environmental Protection (MoLEP) has implemented a Sloping Land Management Program (SLMP). The SLMP established sloping land user groups and granted these groups the right to use marginal land for agroforestry development. This devolution of land rights from state control onto local groups is a landmark in North Korea, and this decentralization initiative has now expanded to over eight counties to involve thousands of households. It has also led to the launch of a National Agroforestry Policy and Strategy. Drawing from both qualitative and quantitative data collected from 2008 to 2014, this paper documents the process and effects of the SLMP. It argues that the decentralization reform in land management has contributed to not only food security with increased food crop diversity and productivity, but also notably forest recovery through an expansion of tree plantations and agroforestry practices on degraded sloping lands. However, an insufficient power transfer in the form of a lack of timber rights granted to the local user groups has hampered the effectiveness of the SLMP. There are also institutional and geopolitical challenges that are limiting further scaling-up of land-use decentralization across the country. The policy implication calls for more international investment as well as national land-use policy reforms in order to promote and facilitate further decentralization of sloping land management and to secure greater use rights for sloping land user groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Potato has become one of the staple crops to improve food security in North Korea since the late 1990s. However, the potato yield has been stagnated around 11–12 t ha−1 for several decades, and a food shortage is still a primary issue in North Korea. Yield gap analyses were carried out using the SUBSTOR-potato model to quantify the potato yield gaps and explore the potential ways to close the yield gaps in two different cropping seasons in North Korea (early- and main-season potatoes). Yield gaps were estimated to be around 80% for both early- and main-season potatoes. Early-season potato yield was substantially determined by water or nitrogen supplies, depending on the year's weather condition (i.e., with or without spring drought). Irrigation during the vegetative stage could effectively reduce the year-to-year variation in yield as well as the yield gap (+7.0 t ha−1, +66.1%). Meanwhile, additional nitrogen fertilizer in the early-season potatoes was less effective compared to that in the main-season potatoes. For the main-season potatoes, where precipitation was sufficient, the primary limiting factor of yield was nitrogen supply. Since heavy rainfall aggravated nitrogen leaching, additional nitrogen fertilizer is recommended as a top dressing rather than a basal dressing. Additional top dressing at 50 days after planting with the current amount of nitrogen fertilizer was expected to increase the main-season potato yield by 42.0 t ha−1 (+191.4%). This study highlights that the primary limiting factor of potato yield may differ between the cropping seasons. Therefore, our findings suggest that different agronomic strategies should be applied for different cropping seasons to improve potato production in North Korea, where agronomic resources are limited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]