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The hermit kingdom faces falling apart, experts say, with Kim Jong-un warning his people to expect a new famine.

Its farms rely on foreigners for fertiliser, but neighbouring South Korea cut off supplies in 2010 after the North sank one of its ships.

And though the South allowed some fertiliser to be sent last year, deteriorating relations may mean that Kim needs to get creative before harvest time.

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Yeonmi Park, who escaped from North Korea in 2007, described how party chiefs in Pyongyang tried to solve the shortfall the last time around.

She said: "The government came up with a campaign to fill the fertiliser gap with a local and renewable source: human and animal waste.

"Every worker and every school had a quota to fill. You can imagine what kind of problems this created for our families.

"Every member of the household had a daily assignment, so when we got up in the morning, it was like a war. My aunts were the most competitive."

In her memoir, In Order To Live, Ms Park recalls how her aunt in Kowon urged her not to poop in school but to wait until she got home.

Another aunt in Songnam-ri would loudly moan when circumstances forced her to poop away from home where she couldn’t keep it.

The demand for doodie became so great that, in 2010, shops started selling it, according to Canada’s National Post.

Some people even raided their neighbour’s toilets in a bid to meet their quotas, South Korea’s Chosun Ilbo newspaper revealed in 2013.

Ms Park recalled: "Our bathrooms in North Korea were unusually far away from the house, so you had to be careful that the neighbours didn’t steal from you at night.

"Some people would lock up their outhouses to keep the poop thieves away. At school the teachers would send us out into the streets to find poop and carry it back to class.

"So if we saw a dog pooping in the street, it was like gold. My uncle in Kowon had a big dog who made a big poop – and everyone in the family would fight over it."

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Each person was apparently expected to collect hundreds of kilograms of poo, which was then mixed with straw to create fertiliser.

Ironically, North Koreans are taught to believe that their leaders don’t actually poo – because they are too perfect.

Some poo has even been sent in balloons over to South Korea, according to the country’s JoongAng Daily newspaper.