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What’s behind North Korea’s shock change of policy towards the South?
(www.aljazeera.com)
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this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2024
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This video is okay, I think it's 27 minutes in full but I watched the first ten and it's alright. One of the interviewees from the US talks about how the DPRK really just wants to join the international community but is experiencing crisis I wasn't aware have been happening since the 90s like energy and malnourishment. I'm not sure how up to date that is
The fall of the Soviet Union took the DPRK's (and many of the AES's) biggest trading partner off the table. Lead to famine and all sorts of resource issues. If I remember correctly, DPRK was actually better off than the South for a while there.
Yeah, but I was under the assumption that period is completely over
I don't think they ever really got back to where they were, but trade with China had them on the right track. Then covid hit.
Gotcha, that's a huge shame
AFAIK the North completely overhauled their food production in the 90s which is why the loss of trade with China during COVID didn't trigger a famine - but they definitely lost a bunch of variety in their diets for that time which understandably caused problems. The energy problems though are on par with any other industrialized-but-poor nation, something that the DPRK has gotten better at dealing with but really can't solve under present conditions.
(as an aside the North's commitment to being food self-reliant is also one of the reasons their economic recovery in the 2000s was so slow - growing food in the North is really difficult and inefficient, which is why traditionally they've relied on food imports, but when that was no longer an option they had to dedicate a ton of labor and resources to doing it anyway which cannibalized labor and resources that were previously being used for heavy industry)