North Korean citizens have secretly spoken out from the regime-controlled country to share the horror of starvation they currently face.
Civilians trapped inside the country say they have watched mothers, unable to work due to sickness, die of starvation and watched whole families perish from hunger.
A construction worker, using the fake name Chan Ho, who lives near the Chinese border told the BBC that food supplies were so low that five people in his village had already died from starvation.
North Korea remains one of the most repressive countries in the world which is shrouded in secrecy under its rule by authoritarian leader Kim Jong Un.
By using the pandemic as its excuse, the regime has shuttered borders and empowered authorities to stop importing grain from China, as well as the fertilisers and machinery needed to grow food.
This has led to the starvation of its people while its dictator continues to spend hundreds of millions of pounds on developing his nuclear weapons programme.
"The North Korean borders need to open and they need to restart trade and they need to bring these things in for agriculture to improve and they need food to feed the people.
"But right now they are prioritising isolation, they are prioritising repression", Lina Yoon, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch said to CNN.
One market trader from the north of the country, with the pseudonym Myong Suk, told the BBC that almost three-quarters of the products in her local market used to come from China, but that it was "empty now".
Another woman living in the capital Pyongyang said she knew a family of three who had starved to death at home.
"At first, I was afraid of dying from Covid, but then I began to worry about starving to death," Chan Ho said.
Three people spoke to the BBC via an organisation in South Korea which leaks information out of the country. At secure locations that could not be bugged, the source relayed the BBC's questions to the citizens to build a picture of what has been happening in the country.
The painstaking process took many months and once the testimonies could be corroborated it built a horror picture of a disaster unfolding.
All three people said since the border closure, they are afraid they will either starve to death or be executed for flouting the rules.
Myong Suk used to provide for her family by selling goods smuggled across the border, so now her income has vanished.
She said her family has never had so little to eat and now other villagers knock on each other's doors begging for money.
In the late 1990s, an infamous famine in North Korea killed as many as three million people.
These stories and other warnings from aid agencies have prompted fears the country could be on the brink of another catastrophe.
Lucas Rengifo-Keller, a research analyst at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, told CNN in March that trade data, satellite images and assessments by the United Nations and South Korean authorities all suggest the food supply has now "dipped below the amount needed to satisfy minimum human needs."
