And like many African families, my parents could never save because they supported siblings, cousins, you know, their parents, and things were always dicey.

But this year, with rising impatience and anger in South Korea toward the North Korean regime, the food and fertilizer is in doubt. And some analysts in Seoul believe that a dicey political succession in Pyongyang, combined with food shortages in the countryside, could prove too much for the North Korean regime to handle.