North Korean leader Kim Jong-un on Sunday (August 8th) ordered relief supplies to be sent to areas of the country affected by flooding, from which some 5,000 people had to be evacuated.
Images broadcast on Saturday by state broadcaster KCTV showed homes flooded to roof level as well as what appear to be damaged bridges, following heavy rainfall. “Hundreds of hectares of agricultural land” were submerged in the southern province of South Hamgyong and affected roads and homes after the dykes broke, the channel reports.
The bad weather comes after Kim Jong-un admitted in June that his country was facing a “Tense food situation”.
He ordered the dispatch of materials and financial support on Sunday to help South Hamgyong Province in its return to normalcy campaign, according to the state-run KCNA news agency. Officials from that province on Thursday discussed the “Emergency measures to quickly stabilize the lives of people in the most affected areas”, she clarified.
Heavy rains forecast “until August 10”
With soil already soggy, further precipitation could cause even more damage, Ri Yong Nam, deputy chief of North Korea’s weather services, told KCTV. “We expect heavy rains until August 10 in several regions, mainly near the east coast”, he continued.
North Korea may have to contend with a food shortage of 860,000 tonnes this year, according to forecasts from the United Nations Food Agency (FAO) released in July. The agency warned against “A difficult lean period between August and October”.
The North Korean regime, under international sanctions for its banned military programs, has long struggled to feed its people and regularly suffers from food shortages. The pressure on the North Korean economy has been heightened by the orderly border closures to combat the coronavirus pandemic and by a series of storms and floods in 2020.
North Korea experienced a very severe famine in the 1990s that left hundreds of thousands of people dead as aid was cut back from Moscow after the Soviet collapse.