More than a thousand homes were damaged and about 5,000 people evacuated in North Korea after flooding caused by heavy rains, the country’s state broadcaster reported, with swathes of farmland also inundated by the deluge.
The TV report comes as the impoverished North in June admitted it was tackling a food crisis, sounding the alarm in a country with a moribund agricultural sector that has long struggled to feed itself.
Last month, the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization forecast said North Korea was facing a food shortage of around 860,000 tonnes this year, warning the country could experience a “harsh lean period”.
Footage from Pyongyang’s state-run KCTV showed homes flooded up to their roofs, as well as what appeared to be damaged bridges.
The report said “hundreds of hectares of farmland” were also submerged or lost in South Hamgyong Province, on top of the severely affected homes and roads, as river levees collapsed.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un “issued an order to render powerful national material and financial support to South Hamgyong Province in its recovery campaign,” the official Korean Central News Agency reported on Sunday.
Officials in South Hamgyong who met on Thursday discussed “emergency measures to promptly stabilize the living of people in the disaster-hit areas, further tightening emergency epidemic prevention work and minimizing the damage to crops,” KCNA said
With the soil already saturated, further rains could cause more damage, Ri Yong Nam, the deputy head of the North’s meteorological agency, told KCTV.
“We expect heavy rain until the 10th of August in various regions, centring around the east coast area,” Ri said.
Natural disasters tend to have a greater impact on the isolated country due to its weak infrastructure, while deforestation has left it vulnerable to flooding.
A series of typhoons last summer also triggered floods that damaged farmland and destroyed thousands of homes.
Kim said in June the country’s food supply situation was “getting tense” due to the lingering typhoon damage.
North Korea is now under self-imposed isolation to protect itself against the coronavirus pandemic, and as a result trade with Beijing — its economic lifeline — has slowed to a trickle.
The country suffered from a nationwide famine in the 1990s, which killed hundreds of thousands of people after the fall of the Soviet Union left it without crucial support.