Farmers strive to feed DPRK

Pressure mounts for achievement of agricultural self-sufficiency

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 farmers in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea go, Rim is exceptionally lucky. The Changpyong Cooperative 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 oxen.

However, this year, even more than most, they are all under intense pressure to feed the nation.

DPRK top leader Kim Jong-un has succeeded in establishing his country as a nuclear power, and even sent a satellite into orbit. Now, Kim is calling on farmers to win another battle. In 2012, and again this year, he promised the nation it would never face famine again.

For more than four decades, farming in the DPRK was characterized by heavy use of mechanization followed by chronic fuel and equipment shortages. That legacy has left its mark on the countryside in the DPRK.

Hillsides denuded of trees for terraced farming plots produce little but increase the risk of damage from erosion or landslides. Goats, which are everywhere after a mass goat-breeding campaign in 1996, eat their way into hillside shrubs, which makes the landslide problem even worse. Overuse of chemical fertilizers has trashed soil fertility in many areas.

Even so, the DPRK is by no means an agricultural lost cause.

As the summer growing months approach, the countryside in the DPRK 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. It seems every valley and flatland, each nook and cranny, has been turned into a plot for some sort of crop.

In the minds of the DPRK'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.

There are some signs of improvement. The combined overall crop production for this year and 2013 is expected to increase by 5 percent, to 5.98 million tons, according to a joint report compiled by the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization and World Food Program. The report, released last November, estimated the DPRK would still need to import 340,000 tons of cereals.

About 16 million of the DPRK's 25 million people rely on state-provided rations of cereals. According to UN monitors, people in the DPRK have been getting larger rations of rice, potatoes and corn over the past two years. The production gap in the FAO-WFP report, meanwhile, is the smallest the DPRK has seen in about two decades.

Farmers in the DPRK 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 areas of the DPRK, some of those changes are well underway.

Nestled in high country near the scenic Mount Paektu, Taehongdan district became a national priority development area for potatoes around 2002. The Changpyong farm is one of its shining successes.

"We don't need chemical fertilizer," said farmer Jo Kwang-il, one of the cooperative's 500 workers. "We have pigs to produce tons of manure a year. They also provide meat, so that benefits our whole community."

For the whole agricultural sector to succeed, more systemic changes may also be needed, such as relaxing central government command and bringing state-set prices for crops more in line with what farmers can get for surplus sold in farmers' markets. Farms and divisions within them could then afford to reinvest their profits in small walk-behind tractors, rice-transplanting machines, fuel or fertilizer.

(China Daily 07/16/2014 page11)