Knives out for North Korea food stalls in Kim’s latest purge on profit

North Korea is cracking down on street traders and food sellers as ‘enemies of the people’, provoking brawls between officials and an increasingly hungry population.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. Picture: AFP

North Korea is cracking down on street traders and food sellers as “enemies of the people”, provoking brawls between officials and an increasingly hungry population.

Official documents set out the regime’s policies for tackling “grasshopper merchants”, as street traders are called, with the coronavirus pandemic cited as a pretext.

However, the campaign is the latest manifestation of a long-term dilemma faced by the regime: whether to tolerate private enterprise as a means of feeding its hungry population.

The new policies are contained in a document called Let’s Completely Eliminate the Phenomenon of Commerce near Markets and in the Streets, obtained by Daily NK, a website run by defectors to South Korea. It reported fights earlier this year between traders and officials who confiscated their goods in the town of Hyesan. Some of the traders were sent to labour camps.

After the devastating famine of the mid-1990s the state food distribution system broke down in many parts of the country and informal trade became an essential way of staving off hunger.

Poor harvests, on top of chronic inefficiency in agriculture, have increased pressure on the food supply this year.

The Times