The public distribution system killed between 600,000 and one million North Koreans between 1994 and 1998, and the Kim regime designed it to do exactly that job. Central planners in Pyongyang assigned food rations by political loyalty, not by production or need. The military received full rations. Party cadres received full rations. Farmers in the countryside who actually grew the grain watched the state confiscate it at gunpoint, then received starvation allocations in return. No central authority can coordinate production and distribution across millions of people without the pricing mechanism. North Korea ran a live demonstration of that theorem for four straight years. The famine hit South Hamgyong and North Hamgyong provinces hardest, regions farthest from Pyongyang and lowest in the loyalty hierarchy. People in those provinces ate bark, grass, and rats. Meanwhile, Kim Jong-il imported French cognac and built a personal fleet of Mercedes sedans. Informal markets, the jangmadang, kept people alive despite being illegal. Farmers quietly sold grain outside state channels. Traders moved food across provincial lines. The state persecuted them for it, but they saved more lives than any foreign aid shipment. A rationing bureaucracy treated food as a tool of political control. Drought and the Soviet subsidy collapse caused real damage, but the rationing system itself was the killing mechanism. Give the state total command over who eats, and the state will feed its enforcers first and let everyone else die on schedule.