By the mid-1980s the North Korean economy had reached the limits of classical socialist extensive growth, and had probably entered into stagnation or even decline. With the end of Soviet aid and subsidized trade at the start of 1991, an already faltering economy suffered a heavy blow. Although North Korea has so far succeeded in managing the stresses that have accompanied its economic crises, a variety of indications suggest that the system is approaching a breaking point as economic conditions continuously worsen.

In May 1994—months before the death of Kim II Song—Chinese food sources were drying up, producing a food crisis unprecedented in North Korea’s history. A year later Pyongyang officially launched a diplomatic appeal for emergency food aid. In the summer of 1995, following the emergency appeal, North Korea suffered unusually heavy flood damage. In the following months reports and rumors about dire hardships in North Korea proliferated in the international media. Stories spoke of people swarming into Pyongyang in search of food; of North Korean families foraging for sustenance across the Chinese border; of outbreaks of cholera (a deadly disease for the severely malnourished) that carried off hundreds; and even of starvation in the industrial center of Hamhung.

There can be little doubt that North Korea is under severe and rising economic stress. If the rudimentary food balance sheets constructed by outside observers are correct, North Korea is currently experiencing an annual deficit of roughly two million tons of cereal. In the absence of detailed information, outsiders can attempt to assess the North Korean system’s ability to cope with the growing economic pressures, through historical analogies. "Socialism with North Korean characteristics" may only be found in the northern half of the North Korean Peninsula, but some of the economic predicaments emerging in North Korea today have been seen and studied elsewhere in the past.

In 1944 the war effort absorbed more than 40 percent of the United States’ and Japan’s national output; in Germany and the United Kingdom it absorbed over 50 percent; and in the Soviet Union it may have absorbed an astonishing 60 percent or more. In North Korea, by contrast, defense expenditures in the early 1990s accounted for only about 20 to 25 percent of GNP, according to U.S. government estimates. But whereas for the major World War II adversaries the period of maximal exertion lasted about three years, North Korea’s economy has been on something approaching a full-out war footing for more than a generation, certainly since 1970 and arguably since the mid-1960s.

As Pyongyang’s leadership has repeatedly emphasized, the unexpected loss of Soviet aid and trade in 1990 and 1991 constituted a serious setback to the national economy. If so, it was a setback from which North Korean trade performance has yet to recover: trade (calculated in current dollars and at official exchange rates) is believed to have declined almost continuously between 1990 and 1994, and may have fallen still further since then. North Korea’s imports per capita average perhaps $50 a year. North Korea has a limited endowment of natural resources (energy products being perhaps the most critical constraint). Without securing access to such resources through imports, North Korea’s socialist economy, as currently structured, can be expected to undergo further decline. To date, no turnaround in North Korean trade performance is evident.

North Korea is certainly not the first centrally planned economy to confront domestic food shortages. Mongolia in the early 1930s and North Vietnam in 1955 and 1956 each experienced serious food shortages. Outright famine erupted in the Soviet Union on several occasions, perhaps the most devastating being in 1933; and famine held China in its grip between 1959 and 1961. Virtually all these food crises were policy-induced—or at the very least, policy-intensified.

The 1933 Soviet famine in Ukraine (causing "excess mortality" of about 7 million) was largely brought on by sharp increases in stipulated procurement quotas in 1932; the great Chinese famine followed the communization of farms, as well as a drastic increase in procurement, in 1958 and 1959 ("excess mortality" of about 30 million); the Cambodian famine ("excess mortality" of about 1 million) was triggered by an indigenous and perhaps even more radical application of the same Great Leap Forward techniques that had been used in China. Because severe food shortages under communist governments were typically policy-induced, the states in question were commonly able to solve their food crises simply by relaxing or moderating harsh and destructive innovations.

What does the historical experience of severe food shortages under communist regimes suggest about the current North Korean situation?

• All previous severe food shortages took place in countries that were overwhelmingly rural and agrarian (Cambodia, China, Mongolia, North Vietnam, and Ukraine were all at least 80 percent rural at the time). North Korea, by contrast, had become a predominantly nonagricultural and urbanized economy by the late 1980s. This means that household-level food self-sufficiency is simply not an option for most North Koreans.

• Virtually all previous food crises occurred within a decade of the establishment of the communist regime. Those crises may be seen as part of the process of system consolidation. But in North Korea the current food crisis has emerged in a fully mature Marxist-Leninist polity, in which a vanguard party has held power for nearly half a century.

• In the earlier food crises the policy interventions at fault were both newly introduced and self-evident, thus lending themselves to relief through policy reversal. There is little information about North Korea’s contemporary agrarian policies and their implementation. North Korean media extolled the virtues of a "transition to all-people’s ownership in agriculture" in 1994 and early 1995. Later in 1995, however, the media fell silent, after the official appeal for international food aid and the official announcement of massive damage from flooding.

To sum up, the economic pressures and problems confronting North Korea’s socialist system today appear to have no precise analogy in recent historical experience. Although the country enforces an exceptional degree of social control over its people, and reinforces this control by a to-date singularly successful policy of obstructing communication and contact with the outside world, it is well to remember that economies under severe stress can in fact collapse. One incontestable indicator of a potential collapse is a hunger crisis precipitated by a breakdown of the national food system.