North Korea's Kim opens key meeting on agriculture

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has opened a key party meeting to discuss agricultural development, state media said, following a report of "grave" food shortages in the isolated country.

Normally such meetings are convened only once or twice a year, but the plenary comes just two months after a previous one, which also focused on agricultural issues.

The unusual frequency of the meetings focused on agriculture has fuelled speculation that there may be serious food shortages in North Korea now.

Kim chaired the opening of a plenary meeting of top ruling party officials to "analyse and review... the programme for the rural revolution in the new era, and decide on the immediate important tasks and the urgent tasks," the official Korean Central News Agency reported.

The participants "unanimously approved the agenda items and went into discussion" on the topic, the KCNA said without giving further details.

South Korea's unification ministry says there have been reports of starvation deaths in the North.

"We judge the food shortages there to be grave," ministry spokesman Koo Byoung-sam said last week, adding Pyongyang appeared to have requested food aid from the World Food Programme.

North Korea monitoring site 38 North said it judged the current food shortages in the country to be the worst in decades.

The Pyongyang regime was being forced to deal with "a complex humanitarian emergency that has food insecurity at its core", it said in a January 2023 assessment.