Details of life in North Korea exposed secretly by residents

It hasn’t been this bad since the famine of the 1990s.

Residents face execution if they dare attempt to escape, or even so much as source or watch a movie from outside its borders under harsh laws introduced by Kim Jong-un in 2020.

Entire households have died from starvation, with ration deployment having dropped significantly since the worst of the Covid pandemic.

Families have resorted to risky side-hustles to earn enough money to scrape by, with one woman speaking anonymously to the BBC revealing her small-scale medicine sales.

Prior to North Korea’s Covid shutdown, she ran a thriving business that sourced drugs from China and sold them at a local market.

After using half the earnings on bribing border guards, she had still been able to afford a decent living. Those days however have long past, and she now – forced to sell what she can source locally – has been supporting her family on half of her former earnings.

“We are living on the front line of life,” she told the BBC.

Her family barely survives on corn and she has to turn away hungry neighbours when they come knocking for food.

She and her fellow North Korean nationals, under the rule of Kim Jong-un, have been banned from contact with any outside influence.

A construction worker also secretly spoke to the publication, revealing he wanted “people to know that I am regretting being born in this country”.

Making just $4 a day despite his laborious job, it’s his wife’s market stall that makes just enough to keep them alive.

Even the market stalls however were starting to appear bare with locals unable to import any goods and the scarcity pushing the price of corn, rice and seasonings way up.

North Koreans face the real possibility of another famine, with the country incapable of producing enough food to feed its population and residents unable to import essential food or materials.

“When they closed the border, everything became scarce,” the construction worker said.

Similarly, a woman with two kids and a husband has struggled to keep her family afloat in such dire circumstances.

Having formerly supported her family on food she smuggled out of her workplace that she later sold at the market, her “side hustle” income disappeared when her employer started bag searching.

She goes to bed at night fearing she might not wake in the morning due to the starvation, which has already claimed the lives of people around her.

“I know one family that starved to death at home,” she told the publication.

US based think tank 38North earlier this year said the country was on the “brink of famine”.

“Food availability has likely fallen below the bare minimum with regard to human needs,” it said in a report.

There were worries the country would slip into a famine similar to the 1990s which, which killed up to three million people.

While South Korea has food in abundance, North Korea’s only newspaper urged the nation not to accept food aid because to do so would be like eating “poison candy”.

Satellite imagery obtained from the South Korean government appears to show 180,000 tonnes less food was produced in the north in 2022 than 2021.

South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported that as many as 700 inmates in three North Korean prisons have perished over the last two years due to malnutrition and disease.

Aljazeera published reports that rations to soldiers had been reduced.

Some analysts said North Korea’s economy was hamstrung by the sheer amount it had spent on its military.

“The regime has acknowledged how hard things are for ordinary North Korean people, but continues to prioritise propaganda and pageantry for the Kim family, missile launches, and strict controls on the population,” Sokeel Park, South Korea country director for non-profit organisation Liberty in North Korea, told the BBC.