North Korea could be on the verge of a famine similar to the one in the 1990s estimated to have killed well over one million people, according to video footage recently smuggled out of the isolated and mysterious country.
The video was surreptitiously filmed by a North Korean journalist and smuggled to Japan via China. Australian Broadcasting Corp. was the first to acquire the footage, according to the Washington Post.
In the video, young children blackened with dirt beg for food, including an eight-year-old boy who tells the reporter, “My father died and my mother left me. I sleep outdoors.” The boy is one of many orphans in the country whose parents died of starvation or in forced labor camps.
The army, too, is starting to go hungry, with one soldier saying that he estimates half of of the soldiers are malnourished. The state no longer has any rations to give them. In the video, a party official demands a donation of rice from a stallholder, who protests that his business is bad.
