A/HRC/25/CRP.1 address the structural difficulty in producing sufficient food for the population but find unique strategies to overcome it. The DPRK’s solution to inhospitable growing conditions was to develop one of the most input-intensive agricultural system in the world, one with complete dependency on fertilizers and pesticides.75 128. Juche, however, did not prove to be an appropriate basis for an effective economy. The industrial inheritance from the Japanese and the input-intensive agriculture was maintained for some decades with the support of the largesse from the Soviet Union and China. In the mid-1970s, per capita GNP in South and North Korea was about the same. Once assistance from outside dried up the DPRK did not have the skills or the political will to address its deeply rooted economic problems. For a brief period in the 1970s, the DPRK attempted to borrow funds from the international community. However, the state had no plans on how to re-pay these debts or how to invest these resources into the development of the country. The DPRK went into default on billions of dollars and was unable to borrow further. The choices that the leadership made over the years led to serious food shortages long before the famine of the 1990s. Recurring patterns of shortages are reported as early as 1945-46, 1954-55 and 1970-73.76 Survival of the political system and its leadership rather than systemic economic development or concern about feeding its population appears to have been the priority of the DPRK leadership. E. Consolidation of power under the Kim dynasty 129. Kim Jong-il spent 20 years preparing for his succession to power. According to reports, it had actually been his uncle, Kim Yong-chu, his father’s younger brother, who had been the original presumptive heir to Kim Il-sung. Kim Jong-il was eventually able to side-line his uncle and win the confidence of his father particularly through his efforts to expand the cult of personality of Kim Il-sung. It was really in 1972 that the intensity of the cult of personality of Kim Il-sung surpassed those of Mao Zedong or Joseph Stalin. DPRK citizens began to wear badges with his picture in addition to hanging his portrait on their walls. Kim Jong-il had been serving in the Party’s powerful propaganda and organization departments until he organized the Fifth Party Congress in 1970 which proclaimed Juche as the monolithic ideology of the DPRK and further enhanced his father’s cult of personality thereby setting in motion the process for his succession. Around this time, Kim Jong-il introduced Kimilsungism, a concept linked to Juche.77 Kim Il-sung’s cult of personality 75 76 77 34 of some contemporary Soviet schemes but soon came to be influenced by and modelled after the Chinese Great Leap Forward. The people were encouraged to work more and more, to do their utmost to achieve high (and often unrealistic) production targets.” Andrei Lankov, “Kim Takes Control: The “Great Purge” in North Korea, 1956–1960”, Korean Studies, vol. 26, No. 1 (2002). Other subsequent examples include October 1974 when the “entire Party, the whole country and all the people” started a 70-day campaign to fix the mining industry, exports and transport which resulted, according to Kim Jong-il's official biography, in a 70 per cent increase in industrial production and gross industrial output value for the year increased by 17.2 per cent over the previous year. Kim Jong-il: Brief History, pp. 57-58. Stephen Haggard and Marcus Noland, Famine in North Korea (New York, Columbia University Press, 2007), Chapter 2. Haggard and Noland, Famine in North Korea, Chapter 1. “We call the leader’s revolutionary thought Kimilsungism because the idea and theory advanced by him are original. The definition that Kimilsungism is a system based on the idea, theory and method of Juche means that Kimilsungism is consistent with the Juche idea in content and that it forms a system based on the idea, theory and method in composition. Both in content and in composition, Kimilsungism is an original idea that cannot be explained within the framework of MarxismLeninism. The Juche idea which constitutes the quintessence of Kimilsungism, is an idea newly