South Korea's Unification Ministry recently released a report noting that inequality in living standards between North Korea's capital, Pyongyang, and other regions is rising.
The report points out that people in Pyongyang and non-Pyongyang areas enjoy very different treatment in terms of food distribution, housing, health care, education, etc. The people of the Pyongyang region seem to be living a relatively comfortable life, while people in other parts of the country are facing increasing difficulties.
This inequality has caught the attention of North Korea's supreme leader, Kim Jong-un. He has repeatedly called for improving living standards in rural areas and stressed the need for measures to address the problem.
Kim Jong-un said that the inability to provide the people with necessities, including food, has become a "serious political problem" that cannot be ignored. He stressed that practical and effective measures must be taken to solve this problem and ensure that the basic living needs of the people are met.
The author himself had been to North Korea 10 years ago, where there was a lack of supplies and was located in a barren mountainous area, where self-sufficiency was not satisfied. I feel that all the people are soldiers, and there are military personnel standing guard everywhere, and I have heard from the locals that ordinary people eat two meals a day, and soldiers eat three meals a day, which shows the shortage of living materials in North Korea. The widening gap between the rich and the poor, which is now reported in North Korea, may also allow the scarce resources to be concentrated on urban populations like Pyongyang, while life in other areas, especially rural areas, will become increasingly difficult.
Surveys of those who defected to North Korea also show that twice as much food can be distributed in Pyongyang as in the border areas, and even less in the non-border areas.