A North Korean mother and her son starved to death after she was sentenced to hard labour for violating Covid rules, a new investigation has revealed.
People in the highly controlled state have risked their lives to tell the BBC how food is now so scarce that their neighbours have starved to death.
Three North Korean nationals communicated in secret to reveal the post-Covid disaster inside what has become the most secretive and closed-off state in the world.
A construction worker, using the fake name Chan Ho, who lives near the Chinese border said food supplies were so low that five people in his village had already died from starvation.
One mother was sentenced to hard labour for violating quarantine rules, and soon after she and her son starved to death.
Another mother and child died after she had become too sick to work.
"Her children kept her alive for as long as they could by begging for food, but in the end, all three died", the BBC wrote.
Chan Ho said he used to be afraid of dying from Covid but now he has "begun to worry about starving to death" instead.
Under the guise of shielding themselves from Covid, the state's decision to close borders has enabled authorities to stop importing grain from China, as well as the fertilisers and machinery needed to grow food, leading to the starvation of many.
People fear history repeating itself and unsettling memories of the devastating famine that ravaged the country in the 1990s, killing around three million, are haunting.
One woman, Ji Yeon, said she is haunted by the week she had to eat puljuk – a mash of vegetables, plants and grass, ground into a porridge-like paste.
Lucas Rengifo-Keller, a research analyst at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, told CNN in March that trade data, satellite images and assessments by the United Nations and South Korean authorities all suggest the food supply has now "dipped below the amount needed to satisfy minimum human needs."
Even before the Covid pandemic, nearly half of the North Korean population was undernourished, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation.
Instead of spending money on bolstering the country's waning food supply, brute leader Kim Jong-Un has instead carried out a record number of missile tests.
Chan Ho said his friend's son had recently witnessed several closed-door executions. In each one, three to four people had been killed for attempting to escape the country.
He said: "Every day it gets harder to live. One wrong move and you are facing execution."
When the BBC put the accusations to the North Korean government, they claimed that their people’s “well-being is our foremost priority”.
They also said the information was “not entirely factual”, claiming it had been “derived from fabricated testimonies from anti-DPRK [Democratic People's Republic of Korea] forces.”
"The North Korean borders need to open and they need to restart trade and they need to bring these things in for agriculture to improve and they need food to feed the people.
But right now they are prioritising isolation, they are prioritising repression", Lina Yoon, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch told CNN.
