Storms affect harvest hopes

North Korea farmers fret about another shortfall.

WONSAN, North Korea — First came an extended dry spell in the spring, followed by a summer of flash floods and typhoons.

Now, with North Korean farmers preparing to head out into autumn fields to cut and thresh the nation’s most important crop, rice, there are renewed concerns that continued harsh weather will mean another shortfall of food in this chronically hungry land.

There had been high hopes for better crop yields this year following the implementation of more modern farming techniques, said Kang Su Ik, a professor at North Korea’s premier agricultural school. But those hopes have faded in what has proven to be another tough year for farmers in the disaster-prone North.

“I can’t predict this year’s harvest,” said Kang, head of the Department of Crop Science at the Wonsan University of Agriculture in eastern North Korea. “But it’s probable that this year’s output will be lower than expected.”

Agriculture remains the nation’s lifeblood, contributing a quarter of the nation’s economy and engaging a third of the population, according to the World Food Program.

But this craggy country of mountains and valleys has little arable land and for decades has not been able to grow enough food for its 24 million people. And in an era when most Northeast Asian nations leave most of the work to machines, northern farms still rely on backbreaking manual labor and have had to rely on foreign aid to make up for shortfalls in seeds and fertilizer.

The leanest period was a famine in the mid-1990s, a time known here as the “Arduous March,” when foreign economists estimate that hundreds of thousands of North Koreans died of hunger.