SEOUL – In unusual candor, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un admitted United States-led sanctions, the pandemic and devastating floods had hurt his country’s dismal economy as the ruling party scheduled a rare congress in January to set development goals for the next five years.
Kim announced his initial five-year development plan with goals of improving North Korea’s power supply and agricultural and manufacturing production during the last Workers’ Party congress in 2016, which was its first in 36 years.
But at Wednesday’s meeting of the Workers’ Party’s decision-making Central Committee, Kim acknowledged economic shortcomings caused by “unexpected and inevitable challenges in various aspects and the situation in the region surrounding the Korean Peninsula,” Pyongyang’s official Korean Central News Agency reported Thursday. (AP)
