Kim Jong-un says food and economy will be priority for North Korea in 2022

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un He put the economy at the center of 2022 priorities in a speech to define the national agenda at the end of a ruling party meeting, state media reported on Saturday.

His address to the plenary of the Workers’ Party of Korea focused on food and development.

The impoverished nuclear-armed country maintains a rigid lockdown over the coronavirus that has hit its economy and left it struggling with food shortages.

“Achieving a historic step in addressing issues of people’s daily needs was presented as an important task,” the state news agency KCNA said in a report on Kim’s speech.

The pandemic and the border closure caused the North’s biggest economic contraction in two decades in 2020, according to the South Korean central bank.

Faced with the prospect of a food crisis, a UN human rights specialist warned in October that the country’s most vulnerable were “at risk of famine.”

Kim, who came to power just over a decade after the death of his father Kim Jong Il, indicated at the party meeting that tackling the pandemic is a priority next year.

The speech did not directly cite the United States or South Korea, but did mention that Pyongyang would continue to strengthen its military capabilities.

“The increasingly unstable military environment on the Korean peninsula and the international situation demand the strengthening of our defense,” Kim said according to KCNA.

The agency’s dispatch did not cite details of what that strengthening would entail.

Pyongyang faces numerous international sanctions for its nuclear and ballistic missile programs, which have advanced rapidly under Kim.

The economic deterioration during the pandemic has not affected military programs and rather has continued arms development, according to an October UN report.

Pyongyang has backed away from talks about its nuclear program since the dialogue between Kim and then-US President Donald Trump collapsed in 2019.