As many as 3.5 million North Koreans are estimated to have died during the major famine that hit the country in the 1990s. And now the economist Peter Ward who studies North Korea has said the accounts published by the BBC are "very concerning".

"It's all well and good to say you've heard about people starving to death," he says, "but when you actually know people in your immediate vicinity who are starving, this implies the food situation is very serious – more serious than we realised and worse than it has been since the famine in the late 1990s".

In his New Year speech last year, Kim Jong-un described the ongoing food shortages in North Korea as a "great life-or-death struggle" and said his main goal for 2022 was economic development. A propaganda film showed the leader looking remarkably slim and claimed he's "completely withered away" with worry for his people – but the reports coming out of North Korea paint a very different story and suggest economic development was far from the agenda last year.

Life in North Korea: 29 facts that will shock you