Kind of a slight exaggeration imo. If the majority of the population in a country were legitimately on the brink of starvation, it would legitimately not function. They did have a famine in the 1990s, but they’ve mostly recovered from that by now.
If you are genuinely curious, there’s another source I found about a closer look on North Korea’s current food situation.
http://clok.uclan.ac.uk/id/eprint/14642/1/1_NKR_V12n1_Spring_2016_Smith%20article.pdf
“The North Korean famine of the mid-1990s is well-known and well-researched in terms of causation, processes, outcomes and consequences. Much less is known, however, about the changing health and nutritional status of the population since the famine and, indeed, the dominant perspective is that nothing much has changed in the DPRK. Yet, despite a precarious economy, the end of systematic government provision of food to the population, and a decline in assistance from international organizations after 2001, the data shows that by the mid-2010s, national levels of severe wasting, an indication of famine-like conditions in the population, were lower than in other low income countries globally and on a par with those prevailing in other developing countries in East Asia and the Pacific.”