“Significant” numbers of vulnerable North Koreans in small and medium-sized cities are starving and suffering from malnutrition due to food shortages, though the crisis does not yet approach the severity of the mass famine in the 1990s, according to Seoul’s unification ministry.

Multiple levels of the ROK government, including the intelligence agency and unification ministry, share the assessment that food insecurity has not yet reached a level that “DPRK authorities cannot control,” a high-level ministry official told reporters Thursday.