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EDITOR IN CHIEF- ABDULLAH BIN SALIM AL SHUEILI

Fake meat, free markets ease N Koreans’ hunger

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SEOUL: Take the dregs left from making soy bean oil, which usually go to feed the animals. Press and roll them into a sandy-coloured paste. Stuff with rice, and top with chilli sauce. The dish’s name, injogogi, means “man-made meat.” In North Korea for years it was a recipe for survival. Today it is a popular street food, traded alongside other goods and services on informal markets, known as jangmadang. Defectors say there are hundreds of these markets.


The creation and informal trade of injogogi and other foods offers a window into a barter economy that has kept North Korea afloat despite years of isolation, abuse and sanctions.


“Back in the day, people had injogogi to fill themselves up as a substitute for meat,” said Cho Ui-sung, a North Korean who defected to the South in 2014. “Now people eat it for its taste.”


North Korea was set up with backing from the Soviet Union as a socialist state. The Soviet collapse in 1991 crippled the North Korean economy and brought down its centralised food distribution system. As many as three million people died. Those who survived were forced to forage, barter and invent meals from whatever they found.


Since people started to use their own initiative, studies indicate, person-to-person dealings have become the way millions of North Koreans procure basic necessities such as food and clothing.


But the prevalence of informal markets also makes it hard to understand the exact state of the North Korean economy. And this makes it hard to measure how badly sanctions, which do not apply to North Korean food imports, are hurting ordinary people.


Pyongyang has said the curbs threaten the survival of its children.


Defectors say a poor corn harvest this year has made it hard for people in rural areas to feed themselves. The agencies who want to help find all this hard to measure. Pyongyang says 70 per cent of North Koreans still use the state’s central distribution system as their main source of food, the same number of people that the UN estimates are “food insecure.” The system consistently provides lower food rations than the government’s daily target, according to UN food agency the World Food Programme.


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