A DECADE after a famine killed 500,000-1m people in North Korea, recent news from the benighted country suggests it is once again on the brink of mass starvation. The state food distribution system seems to have broken down everywhere, including the capital, Pyongyang, which usually gets special treatment from Kim Jong Il's regime. In the absence of public distribution, North Koreans rely increasingly on informal or illegal markets for grain. There, a new paper by the Peterson Institute for International Economics (IIE) in Washington argues.

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