North Korea struggles to escape ghosts of famines past
Country’s agricultural system is fragile, but not yet a lost cause
CHANGPYONG RI, NORTH KOREA — Rim Ok Hua looks out over her patch of farm just across the Tumen River from China, where rows of lush, green young potato plants stretch into the distance.
As North Korean farmers go, Rim is exceptionally lucky. The Changpyong Co-operative Farm where she works is mechanized, has 500 pigs to provide fertilizer and uses the best available seeds, originally brought in from Switzerland. In most fields throughout the country, farmers work the fields by hand, or behind bony oxen.
This year, however, even more than most, they are all under intense pressure to feed a hungry nation.
Leader Kim Jong Un has succeeded in establishing his country as a nuclear power, and even sent a satellite into orbit. Now, with prolonged international sanctions and largesse from former communist allies mostly gone, Kim is calling on farmers to win him another battle. In 2012, and again this year, he promised the nation it would never face famine again.
But can isolated and impoverished North Korea ever escape the ghosts of famines past?
“No magic technolog y is needed.” RANDAL IRESON
For more than four decades, farming in the North was characterized by heavy use of mechanization swiftly followed by chronic fuel and equipment shortages and stop-gap policies. That legacy has left its mark not only on the North Korean psyche, but on its countryside.
Hillsides denuded of trees for terraced farming plots produce little, but increase the risk of damage from erosion or landslides. Overuse of chemical fertilizers has trashed soil fertility in many areas.
North Korea has struggled to obtain tractor fuel for more than two decades. Housewives, college students and workers brought in from the cities, along with military units, make up for the lack of mechanization at crucial times.
There are many less tangible problems: state-controlled distribution, topdown planning and a quota system that doesn’t fully encourage innovation and individual effort. All these factors make North Korea’s agricultural sector a very fragile ecosystem.
Even so, North Korea is by no means an agricultural lost cause.
As the summer growing months approach, the North Korean countryside is bursting with the bright greens of young rice, corn, soybeans and cabbage. On hillier ground lie orchards for apples and pears. Whole villages are devoted to growing mushrooms — another ‘magic bullet’ innovation from the 1990s.
In the minds of North Korea’s leaders, agricultural self-sufficiency is as much a key to the nation’s survival as nuclear weapons are to keeping its foes at bay. North Korea needed massive international aid during the devastating famine of the 1990s.
There are some signs of improvement. The combined overall crop production for this year and 2013 is expected to increase by five per cent, to about 5.4 million tonnes, according to a joint report compiled by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization and World Food Programme. The report, released last November, estimated the North would still need to import 300,000 tonnes of cereals.
North Korean farmers are learning sustainable farming, with more use of manure and better compost, said agricultural consultant Randall Ireson.
He recommended rotating and planting a wider variety of crops, particularly soybeans, and using organic fertilizer.
“No magic technology is needed,” he said. “Just good ‘best farming practices.’ ”
In rural North Korea, some of those changes are well underway.