Why Is North Korea Always Short on Food?

Poor growing conditions, fertilizer shortages, and general mismanagement. On the most basic level, the terrain and climate in North Korea aren?t great for farming. The country is mountainous, and the growing seasons are short. (North Korea is at approximately the same latitude as New England, but prevailing air currents make it even colder.) In defiance of nature, North Korea?s isolationist leaders decided in the 1950s that domestic farmers had to fulfill all the country?s food needs. They instituted intensive agricultural practices to maximize yield from their limited arable land, relying on heavy irrigation and copious pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers. They scraped by for decades with only occasional famines, but the system totally collapsed in the 1980s, when the Soviet Union cut the supply of subsidized fossil fuels, from which many of the DPRK?s agricultural chemicals are derived.

Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=b333e5dd59f14d1417cad9c39f992a04

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