The economic and human support for the 1.1 million-strong military visibly crumbled with the end of Soviet aid in the early 1990s, followed by floods that devastated 15 per cent of the arable land, flooded coal mines and wrecked power grids, leading to a famine that killed up to two million people.The children can be seen helping cut the last of the rice harvest with sickles. Carts drawn by horses, bullocks and men carry the burdens. Old men and women forage on hillsides for edible plants. Others glean in harvested fields for dropped heads of grain. Men pan for gold in a stream.
In Pyongyang, the capital, with broad empty streets mostly unlit at night and shabby apartment blocks glimmering dimly with low-wattage lights, the people are noticeably better fed and dressed than those in the countryside.
On one side of central Kim Il-Sung Square, the building housing the economic ministries carries the emblem of the Korean Worker's Party, along with portraits of Marx and Lenin. Mid-last year, Mr Kim belatedly launched his country into a tentative version of China's 1978 market reforms, raising salaries and prices, allowing small markets to open, and drastically devaluing the currency.
The result has been a gradual introduction of a cash economy to a previously ration and quota-based system. But production has not noticeably responded except perhaps in the numerous small vegetable plots around apartment blocks and workplaces.
Somehow, trade with China is expanding, with North Korea's imports from its neighbour surging 22 per cent in the first six months of the year to 594 million won ($A383 million) mostly for oil. How it is paid for, when North Korea exported only 237 million won back in the same period, is a mystery - unless China is extending endless credit or Pyongyang is using some of the 1100 million won or so it earns annually from its export mainstay, ballistic missiles to the Middle East.
In Pyongyang, the capital, with broad empty streets mostly unlit at night and shabby apartment blocks glimmering dimly with low-wattage lights, the people are noticeably better fed and dressed than those in the countryside.
On one side of central Kim Il-Sung Square, the building housing the economic ministries carries the emblem of the Korean Worker's Party, along with portraits of Marx and Lenin. Mid-last year, Mr Kim belatedly launched his country into a tentative version of China's 1978 market reforms, raising salaries and prices, allowing small markets to open, and drastically devaluing the currency.
The result has been a gradual introduction of a cash economy to a previously ration and quota-based system. But production has not noticeably responded except perhaps in the numerous small vegetable plots around apartment blocks and workplaces.
Somehow, trade with China is expanding, with North Korea's imports from its neighbour surging 22 per cent in the first six months of the year to 594 million won ($A383 million) mostly for oil. How it is paid for, when North Korea exported only 237 million won back in the same period, is a mystery - unless China is extending endless credit or Pyongyang is using some of the 1100 million won or so it earns annually from its export mainstay, ballistic missiles to the Middle East.
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