North Korean Famine of the 1990s

The North Korean famine of the 1990s, called by the North Korean government the Arduous March, was a period of mass starvation and broader economic collapse in North Korea from roughly 1994 to 1999. The loss of Soviet economic support following the USSR' s collapse, combined with chronic agricultural mismanagement under the country' s centrally planned farming system and a series of severe floods and droughts, caused domestic food production and imports to fall sharply; death-toll estimates vary widely, with figures commonly cited between roughly 240,000 and 3.5 million, and the crisis prompted a wave of defections and a sustained international humanitarian aid effort that continued into the early 2000s.