SW News: A deepening food crisis in North Korea has caused millions of people to go hungry and suffer from malnutrition, and forced individuals to exit the communist country illegally.

The situation is worse in Ryanggang province than in the Covid-19 epidemic in 2022, Radio Free Asia's Korean Service reported. The current food crisis on the cooperative farms in Ryanggang and Chagang is so severe that it cannot be compared to 2022, the year of the coronavirus epidemic.

A study by South Korea's National Intelligence Service (NIS) revealed that North Korea will run out of almost 800,000 tons of rice this year. This condition brought on severe droughts in the nation.

North Korea has consistently experienced food shortages over the past few years. Potato and maize harvests were destroyed by a drought last year, and the situation was made worse by import restrictions from China as a result of the border closure brought on by the Covid-19 outbreak.

Malnutrition has rendered many of the North Korean laborers who once worked in the collective farms unable to do so, therefore the army has been dispatched to fill the gap. Elizabeth Salmón, the UN's special rapporteur on human rights in North Korea, noted that 42 percent of the populace there is underweight as a result of food shortages in a report to the UN Human Rights Council.

Many people have been compelled to risk their lives across the border into South Korea in search of better living conditions due to the country's food shortage and economic situation.