Prisoners starve first

As food aid goes through North Korea’s public distribution system, these people will be the last ones fed

A South Korean aid group says prison inmates in North Korea are dying of starvation as the communist nation struggles with a food crisis.

Buddhist aid group Good Friends, which works in the North, says a proportion of those dying of hunger in North Korean jails were imprisoned on charges relating to stealing food to feed themselves.

“The number of people dying of starvation in prisons has been increasing. They are most vulnerable to a food shortage,” it said in its latest newsletter.

The American think tank, the Peterson Institute for International Economics, has warned that North Korea is threatened with outright famine, a decade after up to one million of its citizens died of starvation.